A charitable explanation for this would be that people are unaccustomed to well written documents and so are more confident with their interrogation skills than your writing skills. Even with a well written document, the reader will need to get into the mindset of the writer, which requires effort. Whereas interviewing the writer allows the writer to share some of the mental effort for bridging the gap.
Several uncharitable explanations leap to mind as well, but they don't seem helpful here.
[deleted -- responded to the wrong post]
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.