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Gatekeeping theory refers to the control of information as it passes through a gate (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). The gate is guarded by gatekeepers, who make decisions about what information to let through and what to keep out (Lewin, 1947b). In making these decisions, gatekeepers exercise power over those on the other side of the gate. The intellectual origins of gatekeeping can be traced to Kurt Lewin, a Berlin-born social scientist who applied the methods of individual psychology to the whole social world. Lewin approached gatekeeping as just one of many interrelated phenomena that together make up a social field. To understand gatekeeping, one had to understand the whole field. Lewin's student, David Manning White, was the first to apply the concept of gatekeeping to mass communication. White's (1950) analysis of the gatekeeping decisions of one newspaper editor, called Mr. Gates, focused on the subjective factors that influence gatekeeping decisions. Following White (1950), the field of communication has most often conceptualized gatekeeping as the selection of news, where a small number of news items pass a gate manned by journalists. In making their selections, gatekeepers construct social reality for the gated (Shoemaker, 1991).
The World Wide Web has presented new challenges to these traditional models of gatekeeping, where raw content passes uni-directionally through a gate manned by journalists before reaching the reading public. The ability of users to create and disseminate their own content has uprooted and inverted the roles of gatekeeper and gated. However, if the mass of information on the Web necessitates some form of gatekeeping, what does it look like? Brown (1979) and, more recently, Shoemaker and Vos (2009) and Shoemaker and Reese (2014), call for a return to Lewin. They argue that Lewin's field theory remains relevant for gatekeeping. Much early gatekeeping research followed White (1950) and left Lewin's field theory behind (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). For Shoemaker and Vos (2009), gatekeeping must reconnect with its origins in field theory and add an audience channel to old models of gatekeeping. In several articles and chapters, Karine Barzilai-Nahon disagrees. For Barziali-Nahon (2009), adding new channels to old models does not adequately account for the dynamism of gatekeeping in new media, and the changed roles of gatekeeper and gated. Barzilai-Nahon proposes a...