Some good points here. I think a big difference (and problem) between now and the past is that in the past many people tended to hold jobs for life, or stay with a single company and get promoted internally. So they got incredibly good at that one field of expertise, and didn't need to know too much more.

Nowadays, life is far more complex (and definitely over-complex). So even the lowest-paid menial worker will need to change companies to get a pay rise, and is expected to know how to use mobile phones or the internet on computers to access government services, utility companies, banking, and who knows what else. All stuff our ancestors handled by going up to a counter and talking to a human.

So we're expected to be experts on lots of different things. That means absorbing lots of information, fast. In the process, stopping to think about what we're reading goes out of the window. It's about absorbing data, and we're encouraged not to question it's accuracy or think about the motives of the organisations feeding us the data.