Though the term “information age” first appeared some 40 years ago, it was the more recent popularity of smartphones that turned “having information at your fingertips” from a sci-fi fantasy into an everyday reality. So, with so much information so readily available, are we more capable of making informed choices and decisions?

Not necessarily. The United States is the internet capital and its smartphones are selling like hot cakes around the world. According to The New York Times , however, the average American is so ill-informed that he cannot even name all three branches of government or a single Supreme Court justice.

And it’s getting increasingly clear the information revolution has failed to reverse the dumbing-down process that the American democracy has been going through. A presidential debate, for example, should be a clash of ideas and visions of two of the best minds in the country. But more often than not, it becomes an occasion for the candidates to attack their opponents and make a spectacle of themselves.

To no one’s surprise, The Princeton Review found a sharp decline in the intellectual level of presidential debates in the last 150 years. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were conducted at a senior high school level. In 2000, however, Bush and Gore were speaking like sixth-graders.