Gatekeeping
Are you wondering what gatekeeping is? How is it affecting our world? Well, I am here to tell you, gatekeeping is "when an individual or group controls access to goods and services but particularly to information and people with power." So, if something were to occur, there would need to be someone who passes along the information to another individual. I personally have heard of this word but genuinely never knew the context behind it and what it truly meant. However, within this blog, I will discuss more about the concept of gatekeeping.
A little history on gatekeeping. According to this article, gatekeeping was one of many theories applied to the new doctoral-level academic field of communications, mass communication, and journalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Found within the article it tells us the father of gatekeeping is a psychologist, Kurt Lewin. Lewin introduces the gatekeeping theory as "a way to conceptualize the food consumption practices of post-World War II households." He also makes us aware that gatekeeping can not only be used for consumption but can be applied to media and news as well.
The person who developed the word gatekeeping is Kurt Zadek Lewin. He was born in Germany and was a psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. You'll see in the article on the gatekeeping theory that Lewin developed the concept in the field of psychology called psychological "field" and "life space" in order to understand human behavior and its important consideration of total space. Lewin describes to us his definition of gatekeeping which is "It's nothing but to block unwanted or useless things by using a gate." The person who will make the decisions is known to be the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper is in charge of preventing something from reaching the wrong individual and deciding what gets published and what does not.
To provide, here is an example of the gatekeeping theory in use from businesstopia, "Ice skating is not popular in countries with a tropical climate. If the media of those countries show those issues, people will not have any interest and might totally skip the page or change channels in television. The topic is not appropriate for the area but can be a very famous topic for countries like South Korea or Finland. The editor must try to replace the story with something else." Gatekeeping is programmed to be able to tell the difference between real and fake news. When it comes to individuals who want to post their own media they are responsible for being their own gatekeeper.
Nowadays gatekeeping is used towards filtering information to the public through the media. Gatekeeping in the media world is controlled by editors, producers, reporters, and many others who will prevent consumers from seeing certain things. Overall, this theory is used as a process of selecting and filtering items for media and editing them. These decisions for what happens for gatekeeping are occurring every day to be able to sort out the appropriate items that audiences will be seeing. Gatekeeping is now one of the essential and foundational theories in communication studies according to mass comm theory.
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