Gatekeeping: The work of medieval gossips or modern-day search engines?

Juxtaposing medieval and modern definitions of gatekeeping throughout her talk, Dr. Barzilai-Nahon began with the traditional notion of a gatekeeper as a person in charge of passage through a gate. This medieval gatekeeper not only judges who may or may not pass through the gate, but also dispenses the news and gossip of their choosing along the way. Gatekeeping in the Information Age, the speaker held, is not done by one person but through various system and network gatekeeping mechanisms like search engines. The information control exerted by these online gatekeepers primarily exists in the forms of firewall security and content censorship.

As librarians and information professionals to be, we well know that information nowadays is available through many channels, not the least of which is the Internet. Of concern to Dr. Barzilai-Nahon is the fact that the current form of online gatekeeping places the power of information control within the hands of very few. So, although we have access to more information than ever before, the number of gatekeepers that control the information we get is very small.

Dr. Barzilai-Nahon’s research estimates that 75% of national and international online information control is exerted by four commercial search engines. Unsurprisingly, these are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. The filtering, blocking, and “fire-walling” done by these search engines causes huge amounts of information (good and bad) to be censored all the time.

A side-effect of globalization online has also caused culturally-banned information to be blocked from some countries’ versions of these search engines. Dr. Barzilai-Nahon gave the example of Germany’s Google purposely not recognizing certain controversial words or ideas so that no information on such a topic could be found, while the same word search in the US’s Google yielded several hits.

Censorship and international information control, all perpetrated by our favorite search engines! Can we get around these strong-armed guards and still use them for our online searching? Dr. Barzilai-Nahon soothed her now rapt audience by introducing a tool she has built called the Virtual Community Enabler. The tool acts as a guide, telling us how to find information and get our questions through the gates of information control. Internet users, members of online communities, and more will be able to use this tool to help determine whether their query or message can pass through the search engines’ controls by using it to analyze each word and asses its risk of being blocked. By simply changing the words that will be deemed troublesome by online gatekeepers, you can still keep your meaning and get through to the information you want.

I wish I could now provide you a link to this ingenious, power-to-the-people tool, but, alas, it is still in development phase. Six months from now, I will be “Google-ing” Dr. Barzilai-Nahon’s Virtual Community Enabler, hoping against hope that the tool allows her to subvert the online gatekeepers, and give us a link to the tool that will help us get our message across, wherever in the world we may be.

Dr. Karine Barzilai-Nahon