In the article “The Many Faced ‘You’ of Social Media” by Sharon Meraz, I was very intrigued by the sections titled “Social Network Theory” and “Gatekeeping”. This section got me thinking about the question, “to what extent do social media networks share similar characteristics to the larger superstructure environment of the World Wide Network” (Meraz 126).
Meraz goes on to explain that “several studies have shown that patterns of link structure within networks on the World Wide Web network exhibit a power law distribution” (Meraz 126). Areas such as growth of websites and website traffic have been found to exhibit power law characteristics (Meraz 126). That is saying that every aspect of a website, from how it grows to who finds the site has to do with a larger power at hand. However, there is little to no work to date that exists to explain power law dynamics within social media news communities (Meraz 126). Meraz states that “if these sites are subject to strong power law effects, it would mean that select users get more success at achieving popular stories than the majority of users within the network” (Meraz 127).
What is gatekeeping?
Meraz goes on to explain gatekeeping and how it affects social media news stating, “in their most extreme form, social media news aggregator sites are creating a new form of gatekeeping that is bottom-up as opposed to top-down” (Meraz 127). Gatekeeping is the term used to describe the news selection process. It has been defined as “the process by which the vast array of potential news messages are winnowed, shaped and prodded into these few that are actually transmitted by the news media” (Meraz 127). There are five factors that act as impact variables on the news selection process: 1) ideological factors, 2) extramedia factors, 3) organizational factors, 4) media professional routines and 5) individuality. Further studies are taking place to examine how hyperlinks and the World Wide Web are affected by gatekeeping.
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