Its not that we're the dumbest generation, but the gap in how we learn is bigger then prior generations. As such, it is (slightly/moderately/incredibly, pick one based on who you're talking about) more difficult for generations that did not grow up under these circumstances to understand. No matter how much you study something, living through it will provide a completely different perspective.

For the past few literate generations, it was expected to have to memorize facts by reading textbooks or borrowing things from the library or other sources for a _limited_ amount of time. And then you would have to read them to find the exact bit of information. Or maybe you would talk with a professor about a topic if they knew about it. Either way, there was a limited amount of time that you could spend learning - the rest had to be dedicated to note taking for later memorization.

Now, we (this generation, myself included) have access to more information on more topics than most of us know what to do with and we can easily search it for the bits we need. There's no reason (from this perspective) why we cant keep a copy of or refer to something for however long we need. We expect information to always be there. We rely on connectivity for what older generations would have spent time memorizing.

Maybe we don't care for specifics nearly as much as we do for getting the general idea of a task. After all, with solid foundations, the rest is simple to pick up, no matter what the task. The phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" may very well apply to this generation more so than any other generation before us and possibly a great deal that will come after us.

Is this for the best? Remains to be seen. But, in the mean time, go read a wiki article, go google that bit of information you need. Read manpages to find what the meaning of that obscure sed flag is that you need to finish that twitter one liner from awhile ago. Or you can spend the time trying to memorize how to deal with an obscure condition that only occurs when you use cobol for some other obscure system that badly needs a rewrite when you may never run into such a system.

In a way I'd say yes, since smartness is a hybrid of latent intelligence and how well a person knows the system they live in. The younger generation is not as smart in the critiqued author's system, so from the author's perspective they are relatively dumb. However, their objective dumbness is really a function of the effectiveness of the system they are a part of vs the effectiveness of the author's system.