Zombie Media 87
relations with each other). From this, they adopt Kurt Lewin’s field
theory as an approach to gatekeeping (adapted from Manning White
and Shoemaker’s earlier work), whereby multiple gates operate within
and outside organisations, creating various pressure points in which
messages are transmitted, discarded, or shaped according to various
levels of individual, organisational, or social activity.
30
The value of
this approach to the social media age is that it is highly networked:
there is never one gate but multiple ones, with distributed agency
across organisations.
Shoemaker and Vos mention Facebook only once – rather blandly
observing that the site, alongside others such as Reddit and YouTube,
“allow anyone to become a gatekeeper by passing along news items and
commenting on them”.
31
In this approach, they clearly see social media
users as, at best, individual gatekeepers or forces operating largely outside the organisation: this ignores the effect that large social media sites
such as Facebook have in actually creating the news (which, as noted in
the previous chapter, Zuckerberg explicitly wished to achieve when he
drove the redesign of Facebook’s news feed). While useful, then, gatekeeping theory as developed for late twentieth-century media monopolies has its limitations, and Vos has suggested the need to “reimagine
gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era”.
32
More recent work, such as
that by Myers West, and Welbers and Opgenhaffen, extends Shoemaker’s and Vos’s field theory approach. Myers West demonstrates how, by
ranking, channelling, promoting, and deleting posts, social media sites
such as Facebook act as networked gatekeepers,
33
and we shall explore
an extended case study of such activity in the final chapter of this book
when turning to the role of big tech in suppressing Infowars. Welbers
and Opgenhaffen concentrate on the significance of Facebook in particular for news sites, offering as it does one of the most important means
today for them to connect with an audience: by mapping shares and likes
as part of the engagement with a story, they are able to demonstrate how
social media is able to boost the diffusion of that story, although they
still tend to treat Facebook as a fairly transparent medium for transmission of information across the network.
34
What the election of 2016
showed very clearly was that social media was anything but a transparent medium.
The Algorithm of Truth in a Post-Truth Age
In February of that year, four months before Donald Trump announced
that he would enter the election as a Republican contender, a group of
engineers at Google published a paper that created a considerable stir
in engineering circles. Titled “Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the
Trustworthiness of Web Sources”, the eight engineers explained their
work in attempting to compute the trustworthiness of 119 million web
relations with each other). From this, they adopt Kurt Lewin’s field
theory as an approach to gatekeeping (adapted from Manning White
and Shoemaker’s earlier work), whereby multiple gates operate within
and outside organisations, creating various pressure points in which
messages are transmitted, discarded, or shaped according to various
levels of individual, organisational, or social activity.
30
The value of
this approach to the social media age is that it is highly networked:
there is never one gate but multiple ones, with distributed agency
across organisations.
Shoemaker and Vos mention Facebook only once – rather blandly
observing that the site, alongside others such as Reddit and YouTube,
“allow anyone to become a gatekeeper by passing along news items and
commenting on them”.
31
In this approach, they clearly see social media
users as, at best, individual gatekeepers or forces operating largely outside the organisation: this ignores the effect that large social media sites
such as Facebook have in actually creating the news (which, as noted in
the previous chapter, Zuckerberg explicitly wished to achieve when he
drove the redesign of Facebook’s news feed). While useful, then, gatekeeping theory as developed for late twentieth-century media monopolies has its limitations, and Vos has suggested the need to “reimagine
gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era”.
32
More recent work, such as
that by Myers West, and Welbers and Opgenhaffen, extends Shoemaker’s and Vos’s field theory approach. Myers West demonstrates how, by
ranking, channelling, promoting, and deleting posts, social media sites
such as Facebook act as networked gatekeepers,
33
and we shall explore
an extended case study of such activity in the final chapter of this book
when turning to the role of big tech in suppressing Infowars. Welbers
and Opgenhaffen concentrate on the significance of Facebook in particular for news sites, offering as it does one of the most important means
today for them to connect with an audience: by mapping shares and likes
as part of the engagement with a story, they are able to demonstrate how
social media is able to boost the diffusion of that story, although they
still tend to treat Facebook as a fairly transparent medium for transmission of information across the network.
34
What the election of 2016
showed very clearly was that social media was anything but a transparent medium.
The Algorithm of Truth in a Post-Truth Age
In February of that year, four months before Donald Trump announced
that he would enter the election as a Republican contender, a group of
engineers at Google published a paper that created a considerable stir
in engineering circles. Titled “Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the
Trustworthiness of Web Sources”, the eight engineers explained their
work in attempting to compute the trustworthiness of 119 million web