The New Gatekeepers: Who are they? What are they after? Do we need them?

Photo credit: James Longwell

"The sins of the gatekeepers (editors, really) are now identified: professional. elite. official. sanctioned...The new technology has a potential to change this.

What boosters promise about the new media and skeptics hold out for as well, is a true meritocracy of ideas and their creators."

Jon Garfunkel ponders the question with true interest and slices and dices it in eight separate essays.

"To read the headlines, or the bloglines, one might get the sense that the bloggers have arrived on the scene to challenge the “gatekeepers” of the big media. This is an essay in eight parts to examine this theme.

I will argue here that gatekeepers are inherently needed by the architecture of the blogosphere -- as it has evolved, since 2001, into a public consciousness.

This architecture has been developed out of certain values, and those values are the ones espoused by those same thought leaders.

That is not to say that there are [no] other architecture, values, or leaders present; merely that this is the dominant form for the moment.

...

Today the most advanced developments on the Internet are happening around the more refined structures of weblogs and related technologies.

Thus we need to once again consider which values are being asserted. "

• The New Gatekeepers Part 1: Changing of the Guard


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 2: Who They Are


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 3: Their Values


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 4: The Alternative


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 5: The Problem of Crowds


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 6: A Summary


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 7: Solutions


• The New Gatekeepers, Part 8: The Future


• The New Gatekeepers: Reactions