With regards to tech support specifically, people are less and less knowledgeable about their machines to the point that they may as well be black boxes. In some cases division of labor has just gotten to the point where it is impossible for one person or a small group of people to understand every aspect of a machine, but by and large I think the root cause of this phenomenon is the forced deadening of curiosity in the interest of selling more cheap shit. In Ghana people can keep their cars in working order well past 500,000 miles, in wealthier countries people just throw things in the garbage and buy new machines more poorly built and with more restrictions placed on the user than the last iteration. I've seen adults struggle to pump their own gas, people try advice online about fixing their phones by putting them in the freezer or some other nonsense you would expect of a cargo cult, and bioinformatics software grow so complex that people with doctorates often fail to understand the proper application of each program and just churn out worthless papers that have novel results only because of a questionable choice of statistical methods by the programmer (cuffdiff's negative binomial distribution is woefully insufficient for identifying differential regulation). Every so often there is a new burst of curiosity in whatever field is fashionable at the moment, but the trend has yet to be bucked in any meaningful way.
Even the computer companies that you would hope would know what they are doing have started to forget (http://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/lost-knowledge-what-are-you-and-your-organization-doing-about-it/). Intel is probably the best example of this. Most of the people involved with writing the basis for their millions of lines of proprietary microcode are dead, senile, or long since retired. There is no one left alive who has any damn clue how the processors work beyond the basic principles and whatever increasingly small niche of design they are assigned to improve on. Everything is slowly becoming machines making machines making machines with all knowledge of their function slipping away as people make petty little flashing light games that take the existing infrastructure for granted.
As such, I don't think it strange at all that fewer people would seek tech support advice.