“there is almost no need to use brains”?
Perhaps you’re Googling (or Freeping, or Wikipediaing, or car-forum-ing) incorrectly. It’s probably increased my knowledge of how things work 100-fold over the next best (and much slower) source of information: books.
Literally anything I come across that I don’t understand, I hop online and get a great grasp of in <5 minutes. Or spend a half hour to an hour and understand it inside and out in the greatest detail.
If you look around yourself right now and can see object whose operation you don’t understand, it’s because you decide not to (if you don’t care how that flash memory stick works, or your ceiling fan, or your car’s transmission, that’s fine...but my point is if you change your mind the internet is sitting right there with every detail, cutaway view, and reference to a dozen related topics as well).
I still take the paper, then look at TownHall, WSJ Online, FR, Drudge, etc to get other opinions. I have all sorts of data at my fingertips that I can use. Facts, opinions, all have to be filtered.
The bottom line is, we are much more informed. That really hacks off the people pushing agendas.