Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorption of the information that doesn't look good on the surface. For example, I was not very interested in physics until I started reading about Special and General Relativity. I wouldn't be able to understand those topics without learning boring and dry (in my opinion) Newtonian Mechanics first.

In other words, we now usually only truly absorb stuff that looks good in the headline, rather than actually reading about it first. If we actually tried reading about all the stuff that's available, we'd be dead before we even got through a percent of it.