True all too often - yet we must come to some mutual agreement about the nature of reality if we're going to live and function within it, whatever it is. So let judgement rest on the logic of the better argument and the evidence that relates to it, regardless of personal issues that are better dealt with by human beings when they're face to face. This thing here is just a tool sitting on a worktable, we live elsewhere. Or can, anyway.

What is a 'travel card'?

@ Satirical, your questions:

(1) I worry that many or all of us are, and I'm not condemning people (why does everyone online seem to make a point to take everything personally, or to attack the personalities or supposed motivations behind ideas, which are irrelevant if they can't deal with the ideas themselves, in their own right?) but questioning the actual effects on people of a particular socio-psychological environment which has expanded by leaps and bounds in recent years. Seems it's worthwhile to try and understand its effects - I don't think anybody would claim that it doesn't have any.
(2) I'm not pointing fingers at individuals, I'm trying to point out that, to a great extent, the medium really is the message, as Marshall McLuhan told us all some 50 years ago.
(3) No, and so the very idea of 'reality' and 'authenticity' becomes ambiguous. Some realities are produced to manipulate people, you know (e.g., advertising, lies, conscious and intentional distortions of what the speaker believes), and it would be absurd to imagine that it's only done through words.
(4) No.

@dolphin: Answer is no, of course, but it's possible to create more or less dysfunctional environments, including psycho-social ones.
@satirical: no and no, it's not too much, it's a kind of communication that can help one understand communication. I'm not saying that communication is bad, or that writing is bad or necessarily a useless form of communication, I'm saying that it can be self-defeating to get so knee-jerk used to spurious and supercilious substitutes that one may be in danger of forgetting what it's like. Like, say, confusing a movie about war with war itself, or a carefully-manufactured tv image of a politician, on the one hand, with the character or ability or intentions of a person and political party and his/her/their powerful supporters who are running, through an election perhaps, to control an entire nation, on the other.
And I think also it's nice to be aware of actual trees or mountains out there, and not just see them on the nature channel or as backdrops for somebody's (perhaps one's own) selfie - witness people who "love" whales or music idols who've never even seen one. Images are fine, as long as you know they're images, and now we have simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. It may not all be new, but it's getting pretty damned intense.

My solution is a primitive Nokia cellphone with which I can only send & receive text message & phone calls - helps eliminate useless text messages & phone calls that are not important and leaves me free to access whatever on my compute at home on my own time, especially as I have no problem pushing the little black on-off button when I don't want my life to be interrupted. I think I'd rather get caught in the rain once in a while rather than check the weather a dozen times a day. In regard to the 30 zillion photos that are transferred between twinkyphones every minute of every day, I find that my eyes work okay and that I see things and people all around me every time I look. Convenience can be very inconvenient.
Best wishes on that trapeze.