Who Keeps the Gate? Digital Gatekeeping in New Media

Abstract

This article is the result of noticing the need to transpose the gatekeeping theory. Technological progress has left its mark on the media ecosystem, generating and then strengthening the convergence processes, and has also changed the understanding of gatekeeping. The architecture of new media, especially social media, places gatekeeping in the context of the network. This allows one to look at the classically understood process from a new perspective, in which the key is to base the concept on network diffusion. Contemporary gatekeeping should be analyzed in the context of such mechanisms as: information bubble, echo chamber, filtering information by users and algorithms. Basic conceptual categories, the gate and the keeper, are also modified. There is a noticeable trend towards the transformation of gatekeeping towards gatewatching, in which social media users do not create their own gates, but observe and use already existing gates. Gatekeeping in the era of social media makes the audience an important element of it, moving towards secondary gatekeeping.