{"id":7437,"date":"2016-11-18T12:31:19","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T17:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7437"},"modified":"2016-11-20T09:31:10","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T14:31:10","slug":"meet-the-new-gatekeeper-worse-than-the-old-gatekeeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7437","title":{"rendered":"Meet the new gatekeeper, worse than the old gatekeeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"brandenburg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We want to be freed of\u00a0constraints, until our freedom from constraints reminds us of why we created the constraints in the first place.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time \u2014 not so long ago, really \u2014 there was something called the mainstream media, and it employed lots of journalists and editors and fact-checkers to filter the news. We came to resent these “gatekeepers,” as we took to calling\u00a0them, because they restricted what we read and saw. They were self-interested elites who, granted their hegemony through the accidents of markets, imposed their own values on the flow of information. They were anti-democratic. They turned us into a passive audience of media consumers.<\/p>\n

And then the internet arrived, and the flood\u00a0of information poured over\u00a0the gates and swept away\u00a0the gatekeepers. We celebrated our emancipation from filters, and we praised the democratization brought about by\u00a0“new media.” The “people formerly known as the audience” had taken charge, proclaimed<\/a> one herald of the new order, as he wagged his finger at the disempowered\u00a0journalistic elites. “You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and\u00a0our choices\u00a0send items to our own front pages.”<\/p>\n

“The means of media are now in the hands of the people,” declared<\/a>\u00a0another triumphalist:<\/p>\n

So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. . . .\u00a0Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will. Today they are challenging and changing media \u2014 where bloggers now fact-check Dan Rather\u2019s ass \u2014 but tomorrow they will challenge and change politics, government, marketing, and education as well. This isn\u2019t just a media revolution, though that\u2019s where we are seeing the impact first. This is a chain-reaction of revolutions. It has just begun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the pundits were\u00a0right\u00a0\u2014 the old media filters dissolved, and “we” took control \u2014\u00a0though\u00a0the great disruption\u00a0has\u00a0not\u00a0played out in quite the way they\u00a0anticipated. The “open pool” of citizen-controlled\u00a0media looks more and more like\u00a0a cesspool, “our own\u00a0front pages” are often\u00a0filled with fake news, and the “chain-reaction of revolutions” has been\u00a0guided in its chaotic course by ignorance, insults, and misinformation. Now, in a last turn of the wheel, we are demanding that the hackers who took\u00a0down\u00a0the old gatekeepers\u00a0\u2014 the Facebooks, Googles, and Twitters of the world \u2014 become our new gatekeepers, even though it’s a role they abhor<\/a> and are entirely unsuited to<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In place of the thoughtful if flawed judgments of human editors, we seem fated to\u00a0have as our new filters the robotic\u00a0routines of secret algorithms written by software programmers, supplemented by squads of contract reviewers\u00a0following procedure manuals written by corporate lawyers along with more powerful tools for muting offensive speech and\u00a0the voices of people we disagree with. Regress is more palatable when it goes by the name of\u00a0progress.<\/p>\n

One of the less remarked upon effects of our digital age is that it has provided us with an opportunity to relearn the humbling lessons of the past, to relive all the hopes, disappointments, and\u00a0compromises of our forebears, albeit\u00a0in a much speeded-up manner. History is a GIF loop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We want to be freed of\u00a0constraints, until our freedom from constraints reminds us of why we created the constraints in the first place. Once upon a time \u2014 not so long ago, really \u2014 there was something called the mainstream media, and it employed lots of journalists and editors and fact-checkers to filter the news. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7437"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7461,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437\/revisions\/7461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}