Tag Archives: Gatekeepers

Google, reading response.

According to James Grimmelmann, “Whoever controls search engines has enormous influence on us all.” As I started reading The Google Dilemma, that sentence immediately reminded me of earlier in the class when Gatekeeping was discussed.  Throughout the semester we tried different search engines, yet they all seemed to keep track of what we searched.  The Talentless Hack section of the article goes into detail about this.  It also mentions Google’s system, which is called PageRank that goes around the web counting links where the pages with the most links will be displayed higher in its results.  This was accidentally discovered by a college student named Adam Mathes.  He then wrote a blog discovering a technique he called Googlebombing, which I found very interesting.

Swartz, reading response.

“What was Internet activist Aaron Swartz thinking when he downloaded 4 million articles from JSTOR (short for journal storage), a digital library of scholarly articles… Because of his suicide this month, we will never know for sure.” This was taken from the article “Aaron Swartz: Opening access to knowledge.” That had me very curious. So Mr. Swartz was downloading millions of articles, then commits suicide. Why? The article says that the internet provides amazing opportunities to open more access to knowledge, and he wanted to help. What would drive someone trying to help provide knowledge, to commit suicide? This article reminds me of the Gatekeepers theme discussed earlier in class.

No Speed Limit on This Information.

At least that’s what the F.C.C said with their approval of the net neutrality rules, by voting 3-2 in its favor in the New York Times article by Ruiz and Lohr.  This was a very important ruling because now internet service providers will not be able to charge websites to increase their speed or slow them down if they don’t pay.  Being able to control the speed at which a website delivers data is a very powerful thing; the bigger corporations or media conglomerates would be able to control how we process information unless you don’t mind waiting for the other sites to load up. I mean it’s already hard to find websites that aren’t being controlled by big business, these niche sites would be quickly left behind by the faster moving giants.  This control would have also served as an added gatekeeper for information you would have to pay a fee at the gate for fast delivery.  Not to mention this would have damaged the original purpose of the internet which was (and still is) for people to share information with one another.  Hopefully reclassifying broadband or wireless connections as a utility will help keep internet service providers away for now or until they find the next loophole to try and regulate the speed of information.

Corporations in the press.

The Thomas Eland and Fred Wright article both echo one of my beliefs which is there should be a separation between the press and business.  I have always believed that the press should be for the people instead of puppets being manipulated by large corporations.  I have no problem with the press being for profit, but I do have a problem when they are cancelled because of low ratings or poor circulation.   The news should exist outside of the control of gatekeepers and thus shouldn’t be judged on the criteria of ratings or circulation.

According to the Eland article alternative press does not believe that news can be told from a neutral “objective” perspective, which I disagree with.  Mainly because if the news is not neutrally objective then it can affect how it is reported – for an example I give you Fox News.  Another thing about alternative media and zines is that they are the trees falling in the forest with no one being around to hear them.  Alternative press and zines are so obscure that were it not for these two articles I never would have even known that they existed.

Technology is Making us Lazy

In both William Badke’s, Research Strategies: Finding Your Way Through the Information Fog, and  Robert Reinhold’s New York Times article entitled,”Study Says Technology Could Transform Society”, that although there is no denying the inevitable truth that the technological advances that have been made thus far have made society as a whole more prosperous , however, technology in its entirety has made us lazy.  According to Badke, he states that even though gatekeepers of modern society are still of importance, that ” on  the WWW, gatekeepers are no longer required.”  This is a huge uprising issue in particular to students, because without experts proof reading/editing these articles, all articles are now being questioned for liability. Often times students use the standard search engines such as Google or Bing  as opposed to a scholarly data base within their school’s library.  The downfalls to these search engines are their lack of accountability. The quality of one’s writing is diminished and the potential of that student is undermined. Like wise, in Reinhold’s article, he speaks of technology basically taking over the world; which was a spot on  prediction of what modern’s society would look like. In all, old customs from buying clothes to reading a book to acquire knowledge, has been tampered with due to the advancements in technology. Now, everything we want is at the edge of our fingertips.