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. I think it's fine that we can just look things up. Even Albert Einstein seemed to think so:
“Never memorize what you can look up in books”
p.s. For the picky the real quote is:
“[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “…The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
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.
You'll love Low Tech magazine then: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
Not yet, but we're pretty close with 3d printing.
Err... Many of them have a phone house, though some use a privy. They leave their phone in there, be it landline or mobile.
In fact, one of my most bizarre experiences was spending a year or two regularly conversing with a couple of Amish people. Why was that strange? It was on IRC. They were both away at college and, during that time, made free use of certain tech, because it didn't diminish their concept of family.
Of course I love technology, the internet, etc and couldn't imagine my life without all that, but yes I am addicted to my phone and being able to look up anything whenever I want. This is extremely powerful, but this quote gives me something to think about as I type this at my desk job:
“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,” said Levi, another woodworker. “The more people rely on technology, the more we want to sit behind a desk. But you can’t build a house sitting behind a desk.”