You're missing one big element of what books can teach far more readily than a tweet, or an instagram, which you seem to think are the equivalent - empathy.
Only through the act of imagining a narrator or character's emotional state can you enjoy a book, and doing so brings one to identify with or at the very least understand better the circumstances that individual faces.
Yes you can do this face to face, or by living a life that might be represented in a novel, but literature is a far more efficient way to broaden experience.
Books are not purely about learning facts, figures, dates and fates.
Interesting idea. I wonder if there is any correlation to the number and types of books you have read and at what age. Would consumption of other story telling mediums such as movies, tv, video games, etc. be similar? I would guess books allow you to better put yourself in the protagonist's shoes since they exist more in your imagination than more concrete examples with a canonical author...
Be careful with the only. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books while neglecting sympathy for the characters and their experience; looking at the interplay of ideas and theories, for example.
Sometimes I think it's been due to my lack of context. For instance, I love the little Dostoyevsky I've read, but I'm always perplexed by the social world of his characters. Maybe they're high bourgeois and clashing with the strain on that order in the Russia of his day. Still, I thoroughly enjoy the other elements of his writing that come to life. I was surprised to find the most thrilling so far was the first half of Notes From Underground. It reads like sci-fi to me: all of the talk about everything being calculated and determined in advance.
I think he's one of the most empathetically evocative authors there was - by the end of crime and punishment if you can't identify with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, you've assuredly missed a beat.
That said, context is all - and it's helpful to also read his contemporaries, understand Russian history of the time on a broader scale (this too one can acquire from books), and then follow through on the trajectory of thought and feeling with the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov, before landing at the post-glasnost world with Pelevin and Kurkov.
I'm not sure that books readily teach empathy, however. The can expand you exposure to things that others have to go through, but empathy requires caring about other people to begin with, and few books will teach that on their own.
Books don't give you just what others go through, but also what others think - their state of mind. If you prick us, do we not bleed? only works for psychological "pricks" if you can imagine the person psychologically bleeding, and books can let you experience that.
Only through the act of imagining a narrator or character's emotional state can you enjoy a book, and doing so brings one to identify with or at the very least understand better the circumstances that individual faces.
Yes you can do this face to face, or by living a life that might be represented in a novel, but literature is a far more efficient way to broaden experience.
Books are not purely about learning facts, figures, dates and fates.