Ok, I'll try to explain my thought process here. Let's create a hypothetical situation where Person A is asked to research some random, challenging topic without using modern technology (defined as post 1990's for the sake of this example). To even begin, this person would have to be at a library or some other information repository, and they would have to physically sift through books, newspaper articles, etc... by reading tables of contents, skimming chapters, writing out citations, writing notes. If the library did not have a particular book, they might be able to order it from another library, which could take several days. Without the aid of technology, the person might have to get some direction from professors for relevant academic sources. The challenge for this person is to find enough material to satisfy the question.

Now let's give Person A the ability to use modern technology. From any internet-accesible place they can log onto their local library's website and instantly search the catalogs. They might find a simple Google search useful depending upon the nature of the question. They could search for relevant books on Google Scholar. They could search online academic journals, or the newspapers from any major city (and even many not major cities). Most of this information could be gathered in under an hour. Now, this person has to sort through it all. Internet searches aren't perfect, after all, and they might find that simply Googling the question didn't yield anything useful to guide their research. They turn to academic journals, where their detailed keyword search has yielded around 500 results. This person searched the New York Times and found 30 related results from the past three years. If the question we're seeking to answer is fairly ordinary (non-dissertation type), then the student will likely want to rely on no more than 25 or 30 references, and perhaps even fewer. Thus, they must begin sifting through these results to get the highest quality sources, and most often they must do it with a relatively tight deadline. The challenge now is for the person to reduce the amount of material found into the most usable chunk.

This scenario supports my initial premise (that modern users are better at processing information) because we have to do this all the time. If I'm just searching for a product review, there are so many different avenues available to me. If you want to come away with something useful, you have to develop an instintual ability to sense which information is better than the rest. Technology has made so much information available to us that anyone that cannot quickly sort through it all is woefully unequipped to deal with day-to-day life.