The development of science and technology was only possible with scientists and engineers communicating their results via mailed journals, for starters. Everybody benefited from that, not just the scientists and engineers themselves. As for censorship, Internet censorship (as in the "Great Firewall of China") is rather easy to automate (and is getting harder to avoid). Paper censorship (such as in East Germany) required thousands of workers to open and read mail physically in order to check if anything subversive was being discussed. Maybe with modern OCR it could be automated a bit more, but still not as easy as just blocking a website.