EOTO: Gatekeeping

 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 personal bias could sway what news they publish.

Gatekeeping is a term that is thrown around a lot on social media. For example, I see a ton of tiktoks where someone will share a life hack that can save a lot of money, and the comments will be consisted of "thanks for not gatekeeping". In fact, last night I was watching tiktoks and I saw a post about a free college program where they give you a stipend. The comments were the same. However, other comments included "ok you can take it down now that I saw this". While joking, most of these comments are actually encouraging gatekeeping. We are a hypocritical society that doesn't want gatekeeping on good deals, but wants to keep them secret so they remain good deals. I'm guilty of this, and I am sure most people are. When I find a smaller artist i am really excited, I feel unique and connected to them, I want them to succeed, but I want to maintain the smaller community that follows them. 

So what happens when someone shares information that benefits the masses?In a more extreme case, we experience censorship. When one group of individuals controls what is shown in the media, things will get messy.  In a less extreme case, when someone on social media shares that walmart has really good and cheap sweatpants, the sweatpants are sold out almost immediately. I saw this first hand as I tried to buy some. This is why we dislike the idea of gatekeeping while also encouraging it. Another form of "gate-keeping" i see a lot is when a group of people like a show/series, they will often not allow other members of the fanbase to call themselves fans. You can see an example of this in the photo below.

In conclusion gatekeeping is something that happens around us every day, we just might not know it. We all may gatekeep things from others without realizing it, and are gatekeeped without realizing it as well. Gatekeeping was originally supposed to be a good tool to help filter useless news so the public would not be overloaded with content. Because of this, it is often not linked to censorship, even though it leads to it.


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