Blog Post #9 - EOTO: Gatekeeping

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Gatekeeping is a term that has been around for years, and the theory itself was described all the way back in the early 1920’s. On a smaller scale, the theory can refer to the reluctance of people on the ‘in’ in regards to a specific hobby, for example, to allow new people to learn more information. The example that always comes to mind for me is when you see fans of a smaller music artist hesitant to share a song name and gatekeeping in fear that their small artist may get too popular for it to be ‘cool’ to listen to. On a larger scale, however, gatekeeping is an entirely different issue. Similar to censorship in the sense that it involves the filtering and restricting of certain information by the media to the public, but while censorship removes ideas and information once they have been posted or said, gatekeeping doesn’t allow the information to be distributed in the first place. As private companies, news and media corporations have the inherent ability to filter out and ‘gatekeep’ any information, sources, opposing viewpoints, etc. that they don’t see fit to share.

Gatekeeping by the mass media has a few implications. On the one hand, it can prevent fake news and false information from ever having the chance to circulate. University of Pennsylvania author Damon Linker has written that “in...our world—the loudest, most viscerally satisfying ‘take’ often gets far more traction than the smartest one, precisely because we have lost the capacity to reach any kind of consensus about what even counts as ‘smart.’” In this sense, gatekeeping can be helpful to an extent in mitigating the negative consequences of misinformation on the Internet, especially when it comes to elections and other important decisions. On the other hand, depending on the bias or political affiliation of the corporation that you decide to get your news from, there may be some important information that you won’t ever know or have access to simply because they don’t want you to know it. 

Gatekeeping is an interesting concept because it doesn’t affect everyone equally, but its impact also doesn’t depend strictly on any aspect of a person that they can’t change. It’s impact has to do solely with one’s own choices. In other words, how much is kept from you or how much information you have access to has nothing to do with age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or race, but it has everything to do with where you get your information. For example, gatekeeping can be a real issue if you strictly watch CNN or Fox News, but if you get your news from a variety of different sources and platforms then the negative consequences of gatekeeping can be avoided for the most part. If one source keeps information from you, maybe the next one won’t. Synthesizing different sources is always the best way to come to an unbiased conclusion.

In my own life, I do my best to keep an open mind and source information from as many different places as I can. I feel like this isn’t the case in general, and especially within my own generation. Due to a variety of different factors, perhaps laziness being at the forefront, it’s becoming increasingly easy to just listen to what other people say or what one news station says and form an opinion based off of that. In this day and age, and with the prominence of gatekeeping in almost every form of mass media, that process of opinion formation is no longer satisfactory. It’s imperative to take all sides of the story and bits of information into consideration, and gatekeeping makes it essential to seek out as many sources as possible.



https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/02/information-gatekeeping-not-laughing-matter/ 


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/gatekeepers-and-the-marketplace-of-ideas/567550/

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