What is your opinion about the title question? Any ideas? Why don’t you read on for a few highlights? Conventional reading of documents in print allows you to focus more and give you enough concentrating power so that you are able to come up with research ideas and eventually a research topic. You are able to do prospective research through programming and experimenting innovatively.
In fact, for this to happen, you need to study programming and various experiments in your field of niche and come up with new approaches. In the digital age, there is too much information on the web. You assemble some text and copy/paste into a document, which becomes your research. It requires little effort and does not increase your zenith of knowledge and insights.