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2B2T and the Actual Benefits of Gatekeeping
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[QUOTE="AvocadoJelly, post: 20603, member: 3240"] This post gets at a phenomenon in our culture at large. There used to be more cultural niches before the internet than after. This runs somewhat counter to our intuition. In 2005 there was a book written called [I]The Long Tail [/I] (the name refers to the tails of a Gaussian distribution) by Chris Anderson. The book posits the idea that popular culture will fragment into niches with the internet and that hits are a scarcity based phenomenon. Today, and for a decade and a half now, anyone with some talent, a computer, and an internet connection can produce music that can give mainstream artists a run for their money. The Long Tail idea had a lot of early supporters in the tech industry, but it turned out to be empirically wrong. Turns out the internet does the opposite of what [I]The Long Tail [/I]posited it would do. By 2008 we have Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google and former supporter of the Long Tail hypothesis, saying, "Although the tail is very interesting, [B]and we enable it[/B], the vast majority of the revenue remains in the head... In fact, it's probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters, more concentration of brands." (Emphasis mine) With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Eric Schmidt was correct. In every creative field we see this sort of concentration of popular focus. I claim that this sort of concentration happens [I]because[/I] of Gatekeeping. It may be useful to look at an artform that became democratized (for lack of a better term) far earlier than the artforms that had to wait for the internet. Literature was effectively democratized when mass literacy became a thing. So a thing that was earlier gate-kept by literacy (which was in turn gate-kept by socio-economic status), had little gatekeeping. Today literature is gate-kept by the Academy and publishing houses (today there are effectively two (rather 2.5ish) distinct literary establishments, but I won't get into that now), but in the second half of the 20th century you could open your own small press and probably find your audience and get by. To do that now is impossible. I've seen several publications in corners of the internet try and fail to both find their audience and maintain the spirit of their publication (as distinct from the wider culture of literature). Even larger journals like the Glimmer Train (est 1990 btw) are shutting down. Now if you want something outside the mainstream you can go sift through all the self-similar garbage on Amazon and fan-fiction sites. Another simple example: reddit. The structure of >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk seems to encourage splitting off into niche subcommunities. But that's not what happens, of course. Big communities get obese while small niche communities flounder with no one to moderate and maintain the place, and the users slowly migrate to bigger subreddits. In the end the place becomes a hive mind where only the majority opinion can be shared, giving an impression of a botnet regardless of whether it actually is one. Yet >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk is heavily gate-kept. It is the gatekeeping that stifles >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk's potential to be unique. So we see that gatekeeping does not maintain uniqueness as our intuition might tell us, but rather it can only reinforce a hegemony. You might ask, then, why the internet is the way it is. It's because the 'algorithm' (as it's called) is a highly efficient gatekeeping mechanism. The internet itself is a gate-kept entity. Back when I was on /lit/ there was a lot of hand-wringing about 'board-culture'. I see a similar anxiety on this forum. On /lit/ the people who originally embodied the spirit of the board slowly left as they were hit with a deluge of poorly read refugees from other parts of the internet. There was no gatekeeping to be done here. The community when outnumbered was too dissolute to actually fight back and gatekeep the board. For every thread on literature there were three off topic posts getting bumped twice or thrice as much. Eventually people just began to leave. (I don't know the state of /lit/ now; I haven't been there in years) Gatekeeping is the privilege of the majority. If your forum is distinct from the mainstream culture then when people from the outside start to come in it is inevitable that you will end up outnumbered; there will always be more people relatively disinterested in your niche than people interested in your niche. I've avoided throwing around philosophy in my post, but Zizek's work on Ideology is quite useful in understanding what's happening on the internet. If you can stomach fat philosophical tomes on Hegel, and are willing to spend some time contemplating how it relates to the issue in this thread, I'd say you could look into [I]The Sublime Object of Ideology[/I] and [I]Less Than Nothing[/I] both by Zizek. [/QUOTE]
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2B2T and the Actual Benefits of Gatekeeping
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