Gatekeepers and you: the exciting third post
Seth Finkelstein and an unknown vendor of Algerian scarves responded to my last post with a few counter-arguments.
Seth claims that my comparison of the Boston Globe’s letters section in 1995 to blogs today “exemplifies a tendency to talk-down all the avenues that do exist, but we know are ineffective in practice (going around to various other publications), and talk-up an avenue that’s favored, but also seems ineffective overall (random related Google searches).”
I agree that I was talking down the 1995 alternatives to the Globe, like the Herald and the Phoenix. However, I was doing that because I thought that using them would be, as Seth says, “ineffective in practice.” I have actually tried doing things like that (sending letters to the Phoenix about the Globe’s poor reporting), and it was definitely ineffective. The other possibility is that I’m a ranting madman who deserves his place on the tip of the long tail, but if so, I submit that all of my arguments are always right because, hey, I’m a ranting madman.
Also, Seth is right that I was talking up Google, but I don’t think that Google is “ineffective overall.” I’m not arguing that Google is perfect. I’d like to say, “Here, look at how short this list of ‘things I can’t find on Google’ is,” but I don’t know how to generate that list. All I can say is that I regularly find my searching needs satisfied by Google. I would definitely be interested in hearing of counter-examples, though. (I’m not talking about net censorship here– a crippled Google is obviously less effective. What I mean is something like, “Here’s this brilliant analysis of X that Google could index, but due to reason Y, you can’t find it.”)
Seth goes on to say “That Doc Searls is a gatekeeper is shown unarguably by the fact that so many people talked about and linked to my post after he was kind enough to put it through his blog-gate.” I would say that it is shown arguably, rather than unarguably, and here is my argument. The letters editor for the Boston Globe is a gatekeeper– we all agree about that. He or she decides which letters get published, in the same way that an actual gatekeeper decides which Algerian scarf vendors get let through the gate to the castle and which are prodded with spears until they retreat.
Doc Searls, on the other hand, flies from conference to conference and writes about things that interest him. Google indexes his pages, and as a result of the link structure of the web and Google’s PageRank algorithm, pages that he links to end up higher in the Google search results. Doc Searls isn’t actively deciding who gets on the first page of Google. If Google changed their algorithm to use BrinRank, in which pages are sorted by length and links are ignored, then Doc Searls would do exactly the same thing, and entirely different pages would get the top results on Google. If Searls is the gatekeeper, rather than *Rank, what’s going on?
The second commenter, Monsieur Lheureux, characterizes Doc Searls as having the ability to drown me out in the Google listings, making my post “effectively inaccessible.” Unfortunately, this brings me back to the Boston Globe letter and 1995 again. When the Globe decides not to publish my letter, it is inaccessible. Nobody can ever get it, not even me. That’s different from being the 7 billionth result on Google. My blog post is still accessible from the internet, and I can tell everyone I communicate with how to get there.
I think the real complaint here should be about Google’s algorithm. To some extent, it is unreasonable to complain about a search engine’s algorithm. It’s like complaining about bad commercials on TV. Their intent is to make money, and they’ve figured out a good way to do it. I’m not saying that making money is an excuse for immorality, but I don’t think Google has a moral responsibility to popularize Z-listers such as myself.
One last note: anyone have any good suggestions for how PageRank could be improved? Simply ignoring links doesn’t work so well (Remember Yahoo in 1997? It sucked.). Anyone?
February 18th, 2006 at 9:25 AM
First, thanks for taking my side on this thing.
The term “gatekeeper” has zero relevance to my intentions or experiences as a writer on the Web. Worse, as a characterization it is terribly narrow and tendentious.
I keep thinking… gatekeeper to … what? A shifting list compiled by one RSS search engine? Search results on another? My blog may have a high value in Google’s PageRank or Technorati’s LinkRank, but there is nothing about that value that prevents any blogger of any rank from showing up in high positions in search results for any subject at all.
When Seth writes “That Doc Searls is a gatekeeper is shown unarguably by the fact that so many people talked about and linked to my post after he was kind enough to put it through his blog-gate.” he’s using one of many possible characterizations.
When I link to people, I point. This is analogous to what a person in live conversation does when he or she points to another person, or a document, as a reference, a source or a destination.
If I thought my only role as a blogger was to serve as a “gate”, I’d hang it up.
As for the “power law” (aside: is it really “power”?) that distributes inbound link totals across a graph with a steep slope on the left and a long tail on the right, sure — it’s meaningful. But how much and in what ways? If your metier is NASCAR, of what relevance is the Top 100 on the left? It’s a huge inferential stretch to suggest that a high inbound link for one blogger *prevents* another blogger from being read, or linked to. And that is just one of the several negative suggestions raised by the term “gatekeeper”.
Your Boston Globe example is a good one. Hey, I made a good living in advertising and PR for many years, and I still have files filled with unpublished letters to editors and other forms of fruitless correction in the days before the Web offered the world’s largest workaround.
We still don’t know the whole story of what happened to Peter Quinn. I’ll bet that, when the mystery is solved, it will be bloggers and other smalltime journalists who solve it, and not the Boston Globe.
If it happens, that fact alone means far more than any pile of statistics or our characteriziation of them.
February 18th, 2006 at 2:14 PM
[...] Doc’s push-backs and posts like this one by Brandon seem to want to ignore the very real responsibility and power of the “A-List” within their group. [...]
February 18th, 2006 at 11:46 PM
I do agree with your point that Google’s algorithm, not an A-lister, is the real gatekeeper. But here is where you are fallacious:
First, I would argue that in 1995, you could have made dozens of copies of your letter and mailed them to every person with whom you communicated. By contrast, today you could still tell someone your blog URL even if Google refused to index it. The juxtaposition is not as pronounced as you are making it out to be.
Moreover — and this is the crux of my grievance with your blog — I still think you are taking an unreasonably binary view of what it means for a document to be “accessible.” If a given document can only be found as the 10,000th search result for a given Google query, then I believe that even though it is theoretically accessible to the average person, it is practically inaccessible because no person is ever going to read that far into the results. If it’s only the 100th result, then at least it stands a fighting chance. Do you really disagree with me that there are many shades of gray in between “accessible” and “inaccessible”?
Speaking of gray, I hear it’s the new black. Just as Google is the new Boston Globe.
Lheureux
February 19th, 2006 at 3:39 AM
Google is “ineffective overall” in the sense that if a reporter writes a hatchet-job in a newspaper, it’s read by many people. The number of people who will do a Google search on the reporter’s name and then read a blog article debunking it, is, for almost all intents and purposes, inconsequential. And if the reporter cares, the position of that blog article can often be driven into further obscurity by higher-ranking favorable references to that reporter’s name.
The initial metric here is audience reached by the hatchet-job vs. debunking (we could do a refinement as to worth, but that shouldn’t be silly - one Googling geek does not necessarily trump dozens of newspaper readers). This is an objective mathematical fact which can be estimated.
Doc Searls is a gatekeeper functionally just like the letters editor for the Boston Globe is a gatekeeper, except to a smaller audience. He decides which people get mentioned and which posts get linked in his publication, in exactly the same way the Globe editor decides about letters. Asking Doc “please reference my writing” is *functionally* identical to asking the Globe editor “please publish my writing” (at this point, I’ll anticipate an objection based on the publish vs. reference action - note I said *functionally*. In both cases, the Z-lister must petition others in order to effectively be heard, or else likely labor in obscurity).
Google’s algorithms can also perform gatekeeping, but that’s mostly another topic - the simple way to see this is that Search Engine Optimization is a real business, people pay good money for it (often more than they’ll pay blog writers, which is instructive!).
Doc:
Gatekeeper to *audience*.
The “pointing”, thanks, resulted in hundreds (thousands?) of people hearing about me, and a smaller number actually reading me, who would not have done so otherwise. That’s simply what happened. That’s being a gatekeeper, in no uncertain terms. And I use the term from the blogging slogan of “No Gatekeepers” (obviously, it’s considered meaningful there by the people who contend we don’t have them).
The power law distribution shows that there’s vast, enormous, overwhelming disparities of influence. Some people have far-reaching megaphones, and some squeak in the hinterlands. This is a simple objective fact. And that’s already far from the image of blogging that’s often marketed, as a democratic egalitarian ideal. And then there’s implications, that an A-lister can personally attack a Z-lister, and the Z-lister has no effective defense, which is even further from the ideal. And so on. Moreover, it contradicts the myth of meritocracy (unless merit just happens to follow that mathematical distribution), in a very stark manner. It’s all very much a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
February 19th, 2006 at 6:29 AM
Lheureux:
I agree with your “shades of gray” point, but perhaps you were wearing an Algerian scarf over your eyes when you wrote:
“you could have made dozens of copies of your letter and mailed them to every person with whom you communicated.”
About 100 people read my blog on a semi-regular basis. The shared server it runs on costs me about $8 per month, and I use it for several other websites for friends, data backup, etc. It’s a cheap mouthpiece, and if it were too expensive, I could get a free blog easily if I didn’t mind showing ads.
Compare that to sending letters to people. People call these “newsletters;” I used to get them back in the 90’s. To strictly duplicate what I’m doing, assuming only US readers, it would cost around $0.35 x 100 = $35 per post. If I post a few times per week, that’s pretty expensive. I could save some money by merging multiple posts into a monthly newsletter, but it’s still very expensive, even with only 100 readers.
By the way, the green, white and red of the Algerian flag are the new black. And Microsoft is the new Google, which is the new Boston Globe. GLOBE SECRET == GREET SCOBLE.
February 19th, 2006 at 7:47 AM
Hi Seth,
I agree with all your points about the power law distribution of readership and the influence that Doc Searls has over the attention of his large crowd of readers.
How about Chris Lott’s term, “powerful connector” rather than “gatekeeper”? To me, gatekeeper suggests the ability to lock someone out of the discussion, which is not what Doc Searls does.
I think the difference is important. What Doc Searls does all day is take in information and then point people to the parts that he thinks are interesting, while adding some commentary of his own. That’s a useful behavior that I’d like to encourage.
It’s true that Doc neglects to popularize lots of worthy sources, but he has to stop somewhere. To take my blog as an example, the list of people who didn’t link to me today is really quite long. Usually, it is the set of all people.
Neglecting to mention someone is different than gatekeeping. When Doc doesn’t mention me, he isn’t locking me out of the discussion any more than Rupert Murdoch, who neglected to run a full page ad advertising my blog in any of his newspapers. That’s the crux of my objection to the term gatekeeper– it implies letting people in or locking people out, when it should denote promotion or the lack thereof. To me, the lack of promotion is an innocent activity; locking people out of a public forum is not.
I was talking with the translation-obsessed SJ Klein yesterday, and he said something like this: “The important question is whether someone starting from scratch who writes good stuff can get themselves heard in six months.” He thinks the answer is yes, and I agree.
February 19th, 2006 at 8:24 PM
Brandon, the idea is to convey how what Doc Searls does, and what the letters editor of the Boston Globe does, have the same effects. We don’t refer to the letters editor of the Boston Globe as a “powerful connector”, it’s just not the term used. The myth is that the bogosphere is somehow different from other media, and the reality is it’s almost identical.
To me, the important question is not whether a person can win the lottery. It’s not even, in my view, whether or not the game is rigged in a formal sense. Rather, it’s whether the system supports a living wage (in a metaphorical sense). I think the answer is no (that is, there’s plenty of people who write good stuff who are NOT heard beyond a trivial audience).
February 20th, 2006 at 5:56 AM
Hi Seth,
I agree that “powerful connector” is not the term used for the letters editor of the Globe. Calling that guy a gatekeeper is justified. I also agree that the aggregate effect of all the popular bloggers (acting in conjunction with search engines) is almost identical to the effect of traditional media gatekeepers.
I think that the subtle difference between calling the blogger-google complex a gatekeeper and calling individual bloggers gatekeepers matters. If Doc Searls is a gatekeeper in the sense that we’ve been discussing, then I’d like to ask him to cut it out. The problem is that I can’t find fault with his behavior, given the resources he has.
For me to find fault with Doc, there has to be an alternative that he’s avoiding. How would we prefer that he behave? Link to worse sources, just because they’re unpopular? If his blog were just “Here’s another link to the front page of Boing Boing,” then sure, branch out a little, Doc, but I assume he already makes a reasonable effort to write about stuff that other people aren’t already writing about. Doc, if you’re listening, can you verify this?
I agree with your later assertion about the “living wage.” That’s a great way of thinking of it. I think calling Doc Searls a gatekeeper is like comparing him to Walmart, when he’s really more like a guy running a mom and pop convenience store– he doesn’t have any more power to affect the inequities of the supply chain than the rest of us.
If we agree about the target of the system (and it seems that we do), what can we ask the Doc Searls of the world to do differently?
February 20th, 2006 at 7:49 PM
I don’t think that Doc Searls being a gatekeeper then means one should ask him to cut it out. It’s simply a description, a fact, given that he has a significant audience. Now, not all gatekeepers are of the same magnitude, just like there are letters editors to the Boston Globe, to smaller papers, to community newsletters. Again, far more people heard me after he took notice of what I said.
There seems to be such an impulse to regard “Old Media” as somehow closed while “New Media” as a brave new world (I don’t think I’m even parodying here, that is the tone of the rhetoric). But I keep pointing out, there’s no effective difference from the standpoint of how the system functions in practice.
I don’t think Doc himself is a *bad* gatekeeper - quite the opposite, I and other critics of blog evangelism have said he’s one of the best A-listers and best people around (but even a very nice boss is still a boss).
As to what the gatekeepers could do differently, the problem is that once you open up the system to consideration of the exponential distribution, clubbiness, and oligarchy, it leads to standard uncomfortable social questions, e.g. Where-Are-The-Women (in power), Noblesse Oblige, Right Of Reply, and so on. All of which tends to be very inflammatory, and tempts people to dismiss it entirely by repeating that The Law Of The Jungle is perfect (and anyone who doesn’t agree gets a face full of claws).
On a purely personal level for myself, I just find it very frustrating to constantly be encountering the attitude that if I’m not heard much, it must be because I have nothing much worth hearing.