It's more meta than that. If knowledge was decaying yet interest remained high, then that could be addressed straightforwardly.
What's happening is analogous to children believing that meat comes from supermarkets, not farm animals... Accomplishments of science and engineering are taken for granted. But mobile phones and MP3 players don't grow on trees...
I wonder if this is a general truth, just hiding a bit.
Take, for example, some bad PHP-webprogrammer (or RoR, or whatever). They will wonder what the hell some 'webserver' is and why you need one and what's all that fuss about networks, ports, routing, security and such. (Please don't kill me, I just needed an example for ignorant people in software industries and this one was the first to come to my mind :). In other words, the abstraction of such a Web framework creates a certain ignorance and even missing knowledge about the underlying mechanisms.
And now consider this: A child gets food from the supermarket and does not know about the cow behind this. Looking at this from a bit further away, these two patterns look awefully similar, because here we have an abstraction AGAIN (the supermarket, similar to the web framework), which hides the actual infrastructure (cow, butcher, truck, ...). And again, there are people showing heavy ignorance and even missing knowledge about the underlying infrastructure.
Certainly, I do not know how to butcher a cow or drive a truck either, and I am unable to configure a webserver in a dark room with a blindfold and one hand tied behind my back, but I certainly know that these things happen behind the abstraction.
So, is this a certain indicator of ignorance, if one just uses abstractions and never ever looks behind the abstraction?
What's happening is analogous to children believing that meat comes from supermarkets, not farm animals... Accomplishments of science and engineering are taken for granted. But mobile phones and MP3 players don't grow on trees...