Here is the index of my blog posts thus far:
• Introduction! (A brief introduction of myself)
• Digital Culture Follow-Up (Some thoughts on quantity versus quality with information on the internet)
• The Other (Morals and judgements passed on social media)
• Children and Social Media (Prompted from one of my Google+ posts discussing how young is too young for children using social media)
• The White Whale (Moby Dick representing God, but not an evil God)
• Ahab and Machinery (Ahab represents the person who excessively uses digital culture and becomes obsessive and unhealthy)
• Conference (Praising the Church's use of technology)
I reread my past blogs and saw a reoccurring theme in several of them that focuses on who determines what and how do we know what is permissible. How do we know if what we post online is acceptable? I reviewed all of my class notes and I loved the long tail discussion we had with Dr. Burton and how gatekeeping is at the point of production. In addition to this article, I was reminded of different tensions within digital culture and how some of the core ones include authority and control.
My question for research is two-fold:
How do gatekeepers determine what is and is not permissible for the digital world, and are these decisions biased or intended to improve the quality of life for the public as a whole?
Great question. I wonder how gatekeeping has changed since the digital world allows us to go past gatekeepers so often (self-published books, unedited blog posts, etc.). I'm interested to see what you come up with!
ReplyDeleteI just wrote my blog post connecting this topic to Moby Dick! Here it is: http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/10/kaylas-midterm-1-post-2.html
ReplyDeleteSo deep! There's so may places to go with this topic. What immediately comes to mind are governmental institutions. As societies around the world struggle with the degree of authority given to their government, controversy immediately springs forth. I believe this question parallels political discussions around the world regarding how involved governments should be. Plus, it's a hot topic right now. There was a new movie that's launching, "The Fifth Estate" (I won't be seeing it). But the commercials summarize a plot involving a man making government information, classified or not, available to the public. The mere advertisements have the words "traitor" and "hero" in the same space indicating the heated controversy surrounding the plot. Since I have automatically assumed an extreme branch of gate-keeping, I would specify your research to a specific topic such as gate-keeping within the national security, gate-keeping within the blogging world, gate-keeping for parents, etc. Because there are so many applicable online gate-keeping scenarios I think it will be most helpful to expand the one that is most interesting to you.
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