Born in a free country, everybody here in USA gets an equal opportunity as the person to your left or right, front or back, no matter the prejudices of caste, creed, class, color, sex, or race. But less and less people are 
using that to their advantages, mainly teenagers, and are losing interest in politics because the ideals of the political party don’t match up with their own individual ideals; they just blindly believing their parents on the issues and take a stance with them without giving a thought of their own. The Internet also plays a huge part in this since, when the teenagers do think and try to debate on the issues they feel aren’t right, most of their point and argument comes from nowhere else but online, a place where anybody could say anything and it could become the new trend of the year. A staggering 88% of American teenagers between the ages of 13 to 17 have an access to a mobile phone of some kind and with 23% of teens who now own a tablet too, more than 90% of the teenagers have stated that they go online at least once a day. With these many users online, we run into a place bias known as “filter bubble.” What’s more is that this number will keep on going higher as new technologies are being released. Since, the internet is surely the fastest and the most efficient way to find any news in almost no time, it could easily deviate us from our thinking of the point to something else.
The Internet that is supposed to connect us to the world, improve the democracy by helping people find the people with same thought-mentality, or let us share our views about something wholly new, it is the very thing that’s blocking our ways and is giving us personalized feeds of our social media accounts which at time is just the thing you want, things at the reach of just one key stroke, but at times this could just be the thing we don’t want to see. When the internet curates the informations that reaches to our eyes, a “filter bubble” is created; an expression brought up by a TED-talker: Eli Pariser. 
He refers to this bubble as if this is something we live in and is blocking our views to the outside world. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, Twitter and Netflix are some of the few curators of the “personalized” feeds that provides us with informations “it think we want to see but not necessarily what we need to see.” (Eli Pariser) Companies like these uses a combination of complex algorithm to customize the feed page according to the individual’s interest and curates what gets in and whats get edited out. The result is a crunched up summarization of the all the informations we shouldn’t be getting. For example: if you support the Republicans and watch a lot of its video on Youtube, there are high chance that Youtube will filter out the other side of the political spectrum.
Even though, there will always be one video from outside the “filter bubble,” people tend not to choose it because they know it doesn’t matches up to their expectations, ideals, and thinking, therefore, resisting the urge to go out of their comfort zone. To quote Eli Pariser, there is always existing “struggle going on between our aspirational self and our more impulsive present.” (Eli Pariser) We want to watch the new bill release from the Democratic side but we feel more relatable to the Republican side of it. Hence, as a Democratic country, we should press our citizens to follow both sides of the spectrum, no matter in what categories, to level the ground so that we have a fair and an unbiased understanding and thinking towards the topic than being on one side of the see-saw!
21st Century Citizenship 