Are You the Keymaster?

With regard to the traditional media outlets (print, television, radio, town crier), I see no reason why the gatekeepers won't remain the same. The media owners, news directors, and editors will all have some say in what content the general public sees or doesn't see. However, with regard to the Internet, and especially the blogosphere, I actually realized today that the gatekeeper of the future will be the actual news consumer himself.

I was researching today for articles to use in Waddle and my presentation for Thursday, and ran across a blog that looked like it was written by an intoxicated chimpanzee with cerebral palsy. And while the information contained within said blog related to our presentation topic, I was immediately skeptical of the site's credibility because of the presentation, and the author's poor grammatical skills and choice of big, colorful fonts made me cringe before I read a word. Once I read the information, my hesitation proved valid, and judged for myself that this Web site wasn't worth the cost of the electricity to power my monitor for those 45 seconds. When I ran across an uninterrupted stream of information on the Internet, I assessed the presentation, compared the information to other sources I knew proved reliable, and made a decision about that site's value to me. I became my own gatekeeper, and this isolated incident showed me that with the right amount of education and media literacy, the consumer is fully capable of making informed, intelligent decisions about the media he or she consumes.