While I get what they are saying... I am not entirely convinced it works that way for all people.
Or rather; I think there has always been a relatively small percentage of the population that is capable of that kind of deep thinking in the first place (mostly due to a lack of self discipline, or seeing the need for it in the first place). I had the great fortune of growing up with computers before the web was redily available. I mean, we had it (or rather prodigy), but I was often not allowed to use it, and when I did use it there was only so much you could do with a 28.8 connection. So I thankfully learned to treat computers more of as a tool first, and a source of entertainment second.
But you look at most of my generation and younger and they were introduced to computers with full blown internet. They see the computer more as a mysterious extension of television (something I didn't have due to where I grew up), always hopping from one thing to the next rather than having a goal and using the computer to achieve said goal.
I never really thought about it much until recently because I now have 2 kiddos, and I am soon going to have to train them on how to use computers as a tool for a purpose, rather than it just being a sewage pipe of information that pumps more at them than they could ever hope to process. They definitely need lots of good exposure to the computer/web in order to function in the future where more and more things are web/tech based, but I am not quite sure how to teach them to view it as an external tool rather than internalized noise...