[jcranmer]

> I really do not see how having instant access to information precludes you from thinking. Au contraire, it probably gives us more time to think and it allows our minds to branch out into much more interesting places.

There are two ways in which writing dulls the critical faculties rather than enhances them:

First, writing is necessarily a one-way monologue, not a dialogue. The reader, the consumer of information is unable to probe the author to assess credibility and veracity of information. You also have no way to assess if you have correctly learned the information. As a result, it is all too easy to see misinformation, not information, get spread. This is not an idle concern--an awful lot of history turns out to be very old lies that have been retold so often in this manner that they have come to be treated as truth.

A second issue that readily arises is that, when information is readily available at your fingertips, you're less likely to recall the information to find relevant comparisons. A lot of productivity in science or the humanities is in being able to draw parallels and synthesize similarities between rather disparate-seeming topics.