Stowe Boyd

ATTENTION PLEASE: Who decides what gets noticed?

Scott Karp poses a great question (before wandering into a maze of ideas that peter out without a solid conclusion):

[from Publishing 2.0 » Who Are the New Media Gatekeepers?]

Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

In the perfect world, the answer would be that each person should be their own gatekeeper. The reality is that we are unequipped — we do not have the time or resources. So we are thrown back onto one of four (potentially complementary or competitive) approaches to dealing with this conundrum:

1. Institutional authority — If you agree with the editorial stance of a particular group or company, then you allow them to decide what’s important, how many words to devote to it, and your life is easy.
2. Individual authority — If you like what Doc Searls has to say about open source or the future of media, put his RSS feed in your reader, and ta-da, life is good.
3. Emergent authority — If you trust in the wisdom of the crowd, then Slashdot, digg, the Always-On-Network, or del.cio.us/popular will be a good choice, as they rely on collective decision making about what is interesting and what is not.
4. Machine authority — Various software approaches to determining what is important, like Google, Blogpulse, tech.memeorandum.com, or Technorati, mine the social gestures that people leave behind, like links and traffic, and pass it through an algorithmic blender, to yeild a metadata-based approach to what is most important.

But of course, all of these things are happening in an open universe: they all impinge on, and influence each other. It’s a dynamic system, where individual authority — good writing on a topic — leads to emergent authority (as many swarm to read a great post), which allows Technorati to mine those readers’ links, which leads to increased individual authority, and so on. Meanwhile, individuals combine into groups — like the Web 2.0 Workgroup — which confers an almost institutional authority, or are included on exclusive lists in aggregation, like the tech.memeorandum 2000 bloggers.

So, the answer is: there is no gate. There are many waypoints, many street signs, and many ways to go, but no one is barring the gate, or deciding who is let in. This is confusing if we try to apply the old map to the new territory, but not if we try to perceive the new media universe as it is.