New Gatekeepers Are Still GATEKEEPERS

A soft answer turneth away wrath. -- Proverbs

Doc Searls, one of the nicest A-listers, writes a reply to one of my comments, in part:

... it pains me to think I'm being cruel without knowing it to a blogger who's trying just as hard as I am - or maybe harder - to make sense of things. So, if that's what I did with that post, my apologies to Tristan, Scott, Seth and anybody else who took offense.

Thank you. That's very generous.

Here's the problem:

I have this idea that the blogosphere is the one place in the world - or perhaps an entirely new world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net - where there is no need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.

Regrets. It's not. Let's stop right there. This is an idea that goes way back in a certain type of mythologizing - whether it's called the Classless Society, The New Socialist Man, The Wild West, The Wide-Open Frontier, etc. - of a New Era where rank and privilege have been abolished, and all is based on individual merit. I wish it were true too. But sadly, wishing won't make it so (and mistakenly believing it can get people deeply hurt in various ways).

There's then some particularly pernicious implications which flow from the above myth. If there is in reality a vast inequality of status, yet the theory is that the new world is merit-based, that provides a lot of disturbing tension, cognitive dissonance. There's some obvious ways to resolve it. One immediate method is to say those lower down the hierarchy must be un-meritorious in some way - whiners, as a cognate A-lister has expounded elsewhere. Another method is simply to deny that inequality exists. And these are where the cruelty manifests.

This world is exactly the same as *every* *other* *media* *world*, in that there's a few participants who have enormous reach, while most have little to none ("Power Law"). That's just a mathematical fact. One obvious corollary is that if an A-lister (very high audience) writes a personal attack on a Z-lister (very low audience), the Z-lister has no *effective* means of responding, to any comparable extent. This is hardly life-threatening, but it's not pleasant. When, on top of this, there's some sort of concept that the Z-lister really does have a means of reply, because they can do the equivalent of standing on a streetcorner and the entire city *could*, *in theory*, be the audience - well, it's frustrating. It's a kind of insult to injury. If this implies the death of the dream of the New Home Of Mind, it's dead whether or not we acknowledge that.

The critique of gatekeepers often has an underlying message, that reformers need to face these problems of differences in power and grapple with them directly. Technology will not make it all go away. And that's a very hard message indeed.

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)