The New Gatekeepers

A recent arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal claims that there is a level of con­flict of inter­est for blog­gers who have advised FON and are writ­ing about it. While the Journal’s story, in itself, is prob­a­bly more of a tem­pest in a tea cup, I do believe that it raises some inter­est­ing issues in terms of buzz in the blogosphere.

The New Gatekeepers

For all that is being said about the democ­ra­tiz­ing effect of the blo­gos­phere, the truth is that sys­tems of hier­ar­chies that have existed for thou­sands of years still exist in the online world. It may be that humans are hard-wired for hier­ar­chies and find an innate need to give more power to a cer­tain amount of gatekeepers.

In the past, access to infor­ma­tion was directly tied to mon­e­tary for­tune. Before the advent of the print­ing press, books were very expen­sive so, as a result, the knowl­edge that was trans­ferred through books was only acces­si­ble to one of two groups: rich peo­ple, knights and other peo­ple with some type of royal title, and reli­gious lead­ers, includ­ing the peo­ple in monas­ter­ies who cre­ated those books. As a result, the infor­ma­tion traded via books was largely cen­tered on the cre­ation and pur­suit of reli­gious ideas.

With the advent of the print­ing press, Guten­berg forced a cer­tain level democ­ra­ti­za­tion in the infor­ma­tion dis­per­sal space. This new model allowed a wider group of peo­ple to cre­ate and con­sume writ­ten con­tent. How­ever, the cre­ation costs were still high enough that they cre­ated a cer­tain bar­rier of entry in the mar­ket due to the finan­cial involve­ment required to pub­lish a book. Over time, those bar­ri­ers to entry were low­ered but never to such a low level that every­one could cre­ate and dis­trib­ute content.

In the early 80s, the intro­duc­tion of the com­puter and of desk­top pub­lish­ing, along with some other tech­no­log­i­cal changes in the print­ing busi­ness allowed for that bar­rier to drop even fur­ther. I remem­ber start­ing a news­pa­per in col­lege on a bud­get of only a few 100 dol­lars. For that price, I could actu­ally print a few thou­sand copies of an 8 page newspapers.

With the advent of the web, those costs drop to even smaller level. While a news­pa­per or book could be cre­ated on the cheap, dis­tri­b­u­tion was still expen­sive. With the advent of the pub­lic Inter­net, dis­tri­b­u­tion costs became neg­li­gi­ble. At that point, the new bar­rier to entry became a tech­no­log­i­cal one: only peo­ple who knew HTML could actu­ally cre­ate web pages.

With the advent of blogs, how­ever, that tech­no­log­i­cal bar­rier dropped to almost zero. Basi­cally, know how to write and you too can become a pub­lisher. This cre­ated an explo­sion of con­tent which showed a true mar­ket­place of idea forming.

How­ever, it also cre­ated a sea of end­less infor­ma­tion that our cur­rent brains are unable to cope with and this is where a level of re-intermediation came in: because there was so much con­tent being cre­ated, the blo­gos­phere needed to have some guides that would help peo­ple nav­i­gate to what was con­sid­ered good.
In a word, we cre­ated some new gate­keep­ers that we now know at the blog­ging A-list (and, to some extent, an equiv­a­lent B-list and C-list). Mem­ber­ship on it is lim­ited and many have said that the way to dis­prove the power of the A-list is by show­ing that new mem­bers have appeared on it: what few are will­ing to admit is that the new mem­bers are really only allowed as one of these groups if they are vet­ted by enough exist­ing mem­bers. This cre­ates a self-fulfilling cycle where mem­bers of the small club of “blogs that mat­ter” get to shape the agenda.

The Echo Effect

Because the group is rel­a­tively small, it has gained an increased impor­tance in terms of defin­ing what mat­ters. Algo­rith­mic solu­tions like Meme­o­ran­dum (or even Google’s PageR­ank) help rein­force an echo effect from such small groups. Because the groups are within a cat­e­gory (whether it is pol­i­tics or tech­nol­ogy, the two promi­nent cat­e­gories in that space), the impact of an indi­vid­ual can be increased through cross-linking between mem­bers of the blog­ging élite.

In the case of FON tech­nolo­gies, we have a com­pany that has man­aged to show a wrin­kle in the sys­tem: get endorsed by the core gate­keep­ers and you can influ­ence the dia­logue (I’ve noticed that effect myself, as my own pres­ence within one of those groups seems to have mag­i­cally opened some doors I didn’t know existed).

Because a core group of peo­ple are con­sid­ered of higher rel­e­vance, what they con­sider impor­tant becomes the agenda. Because the blo­gos­phere has also had some influ­ence in terms of shap­ing what jour­nal­ists decide to cover, this effect is now bleed­ing over into the non-blog world.

Cre­at­ing Group Myopia?

The ques­tion, in all this, how­ever, is whether we could be suf­fer­ing from pos­si­ble group myopia. What if a rumor is wrong and gets prop­a­gated by the gate­keep­ers? What is that impact?

The rea­son I am bring­ing this up is that I’m won­der­ing if, by cre­at­ing new gate­keep­ers, we could start cre­at­ing a level of group­think and ulti­mately increase group myopia. As the bound­aries of dif­fer­ent echo cham­bers are clearly defined (for exam­ple, few peo­ple on the left side of the polit­i­cal bios­phere inter­act with peo­ple on the right side (and vice-versa)), are we going to see more polar­iza­tion going forward.

The next ques­tion (and I’m not sure but I sus­pect that the same is true in non-blog media) is how we deal with this? Is there a way to ensure that all voices are given equal weight? Many peo­ple say that the prob­lem is self-correcting but it still seems to me that issues could arise that would not only increase the power of top ranked blog­gers but also help in force the dia­logue in one direc­tion or another.

I do not have answers for this but I hope that this entry will pro­voke dis­cus­sion and would like to see what oth­ers have to offer as solu­tions to this prob­lem. On the other hand, if I fail to influ­ence the gate­keep­ers, I sus­pect that this entry will dis­ap­pear into obscu­rity until a gate­keeper decides to dis­cuss the same issue.

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