Natalie's Notes

 Gatekeeping is the idea that a gatekeeper controls what is consumed by the media. The idea of gatekeeping was first brought up by Kurt Lewin. The original idea was very simple, a filter to weed out useless and unwanted media. However, in practice the person/thing that decides what is useless and unwanted is influenced by its environment, beliefs, and society. So why is gatekeeping a thing? Without gatekeeping our feeds would be flooded with so much information that we would not be able to find the important news we need. On the flip side, news that is important to us may not be important to the gatekeeper, therefore we never see it. Gatekeeping was not intended to be a bad thing. News outlets get a lot of news in a day, and they have to have a system to decide what is worth publishing and what is just useless. Even this seemingly innocent design has early implications. The gatekeeper, which for news sources is normally a chief editor of some kind, may not even know it, but their pers