Centralized and decentralized gatekeeping in an open online collective

Politics and Society

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 349-388

  Shaw, Aaron ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Gatekeeping; Internet; Organizations; Politics; Social movements

Indexed keywords

EID: 84864915348     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329212449009     Document Type: Article

References (162)

1. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
2. Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and Right," American Behavioral Scientist 56, no. 4 (2012): 459-487.
3. David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4. David Karpf, "Understanding Blogspace," Journal of Information Technology & Politics 5, no. 4 (2008): 369-385.
5. Eszter Hargittai, "Digital Na(t)ives: Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the 'Net Generation'," Sociological Inquiry 80, no. 1 (2010): 92-113.
6. Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
7. Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, "Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet," Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (2010): 487-509.
8. Cliff Zukin et al. A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
9. Kenneth T. Andrews et al., "Leadership, Membership, and Voice: Civic Associations That Work," American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 4 (2010): 1191-1242.
10. Rodney Dean Benson and Érik Neveu, Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (New York: Polity, 2005).
11. Dana R. Fisher, Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
12. Michael Schudson, "The Sociology of News Production," Media, Culture & Society 11, no. 3 (1989): 263-282.
13. Michael Schudson, "The News Media as Political Institutions," Annual Review of Political Science 5, no. 1 (2002): 249-269.
14. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
15. "Daily Kos," http://dailykos.com.
16. Shaw and Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres."
17. Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell, "The Power and Politics of Blogs," Public Choice 134 (2008): 15-30.
18. Matthew R. Kerbel, Netroots: Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).
19. Chris Bowers and Matthew Stoller, Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics, New Politics Institute (2005), http://www.newpolitics.net/node/87?full_report=1.
20. Drezner and Farrell, "The Power and Politics of Blogs".
21. Karpf, "Unexpected Transformations".
22. Kerbel Netroots.
23. Drezner and Farrell, "The Power and Politics of Blogs."
24. Jerome Armstrong and Marcos Moulitsas Zúñiga, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2006); Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.
25. Jonathan V. Last. "What Blogs Have Wrought," The Weekly Standard 10, no. 3 (Sept. 2004), http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/640pgolk.asp?nopager=1.
26. Jonathan V. Last. "What Blogs Have Wrought," The Weekly Standard 10, no. 3 (Sept. 2004), http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/640pgolk.asp?nopager=1.
27. Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy.
28. Examples of books include Armstrong and Moulitsas Ziga, Crashing the Gate, and Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006); Columnists include Ross Douthat (The New York Times); Mickey Kaus (Slate.com); Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic Monthly); and Kevin Drum (Mother Jones).
29. Data collected through the examination of archived copies of these blogs on the Internet Archive's "Way Back Machine," http://wayback.archive.org.
30. These were originally two separate questions, the first about incorporation and the second about organizational structure. In total, 62 out of 155 (40 percent) were (part of) an incorporated organization and 77 (50 percent) involved a formal hierarchy of some sort. Details of the sampling, coding, and analysis techniques can be found in Shaw and Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres." For both questions, Krippendorff's α reliability coefficient was≥.7.
31. Subsequently, several bloggers also played a role in supporting and building momentum around the Tea Party movement, although it is not clear that the political blogosphere has constituted a more important component of the Tea Party than broadcast media, informal social networks, or existing advocacy organizations.
32. Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (New York: Penguin Press, 2007).
33. Karpf, "The MoveOn Effect".
34. Kerbel, Netroots. 18.
35. Such dynamics of stabilization following disruptive technological innovations appear consistent to those observed in other organizational fields.
36. Neil Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
37. The data comes from Karpf's Blogosphere Authority Index (BAI), described in
38. David Karpf, "Measuring Influence in the Political Blogosphere: Who's Winning and How Can We Tell?" Politics and Technology Review (George Washington University: Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet March 2008), 33-41. http://www.asiaing.com/politics-and-technology-review-march-2008.html.
39. Using Wilcoxon Rank Sum tests, I found that all differences between left and right on every metric are significant p ≤ 0.001. The BAI is available at: http://blogosphereauthorityindex.com.
40. Correlations calculated using Pearson's r, all p ≤ 0.01. For the aggregate BAI correlation test between first and last month rank for all sites, r = 0.75.
41. Shaw and Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres".
42. Karpf, "The MoveOn Effect."
43. For example, see chapters 6 and 7 of Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.
44. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
45. Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, "Weapon of the Strong?" and Hargittai, "Digital Na(t)ives."
46. Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy.
47. Paul S. Adler. "Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism," Organization Science 12, no. 2 (2001): 215-234.
48. Gina Neff and David Stark, "Permanently Beta: Responsive Organization in the Internet Era," Society Online: The Internet in Context, eds., Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004):173-188.
49. William G. Ouchi, "Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans," Administrative Science Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1980): 129-141.
50. Walter W. Powell. "Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization," Research in Organizational Behavior, eds., B. M. Staw and L. L. Cummings, Vol. 12. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1990): 295-336.
51. Siobh O'Mahony and Fabrizio Ferraro, "The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community," Academy of Management Journal 50, no. 5 (2007):1079-1106.
52. Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (2002).
53. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks; Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, "Some Simple Economics of Open Source," The Journal of Industrial Economics 112, no. 3 (2002): 197-234.
54. Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
55. The description of these phenomena as "nonmarket" comes from Benkler and is problematic given the prominence of multinational corporations and individuals residing within wealthy, capitalist democracies in these new modes of production.
56. Garret Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons" Science 162 (December 13, 1968): 1243-1248.
57. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
58. Explicitly or not, such arguments drew on the strategy pioneered by Ostrom in her analysis of institutional solutions to managing common-pool resources (CPRs).
59. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
60. O'Mahony and Ferraro, "The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community".
61. Siobh O'Mahony and Fabrizio Ferraro, "Managing the Boundary of an Open Project," Market Emergence and Transformation, eds., W.W. Powell and J. Padgett (Forthcoming).
62. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Hearst International Library Co., 1915).
63. Jo Freeman. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1973): 151-165.
64. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks; Pablo J. Boczkowski, News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
65. Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy; Shirky, Here Comes Everybody.
66. Karpf, "The MoveOn Effect."
67. Benson and Neveu, Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field.
68. Schudson, "The News Media as Political Institutions."
69. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Chapters 6 and 7.
70. Boczkowski, News at Work.
71. Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy.
72. Kurt Lewin, "Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Equilibria and Social Change," Human Relations 1, no. 1 (1947): 5-41.
73. David Manning White, "The 'Gatekeeper': A Case Study in the Selection of News," Journalism Quarterly 27 (1950): 383-390.
74. Schudson, "The Sociology of News Production" speaks to the broader significance of this issue.
75. Karine Barzilai-Nahon, "Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping: A Framework for Exploring Information Control," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, no. 9 (2008): 1493-1512.
76. Karine Barzilai-Nahon, "Gatekeeping: A Critical Review," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 43 (2009): 1-79.
77. Steven E. Clayman and Ann Reisner, "Gatekeeping in Action: Editorial Conferences and Assessments of Newsworthiness," American Sociological Review 63, no. 2 (1998): 178-199.
78. Pamela J. Shoemaker and Tim P. Vos, Gatekeeping Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009).
79. Barzilai-Nahon, "Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping".
80. Barzilai-Nahon, "Gatekeeping: A Critical Review".
81. Brian Keegan and Darren Gergle. "Egalitarians at the Gate," Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '10 Savannah, Georgia (2010): 131-134.
82. Boczkowski, News at Work.
83. Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy.
84. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.
85. Shaw and Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres."
86. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
87. Charles Tilly, "Relational Origins of Inequality." Anthropological Theory 1, no. 3 (Sept. 2001): 355-372.
88. Charles Tilly, Why? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
89. Viviana A Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 34-35.
90. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).
91. Tilly, Why? especially 19-21.
92. Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
93. Michels Z, Political Parties.
94. O'Mahony and Ferraro, "The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community."
95. Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick. "Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space." Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Vienna: ACM Press, (2004): 543-550.
96. Cliff Lampe, Erik Johnston, and Paul Resnick, "Follow the Reader: Filtering Comments on Slashdot," Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), San Jose, CA: ACM Press, (2007).
97. Both of which look at practices of distributed moderation within Slashdot. In addition,
98. Karpf, "Understanding Blogspace".
99. David Karpf, "Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization?" Journal of Information Technology & Politics 7, no. 2 (2010): 143-162.
100. Offer a number of salient insights particular to the internal dynamics of Daily Kos.
101. Barzilai-Nahon, "Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping".
102. Barzilai-Nahon, "Gatekeeping: A Critical Review".
103. Keegan and Gergle, "Egalitarians at the Gate."
104. Barzilai makes a related point, but she is more concerned with shifting the focus of analysis (to "the gated") rather than the idea that gatekeeping itself may have decentralized as well as centralized forms.
105. Barzilai-Nahon, "Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping".
106. Barzilai-Nahon, "Gatekeeping: A Critical Review."
107. As I explain below, using C & J comment threads as a data source also fixes a number of potential confounding factors, such as posting time of day, post content, and subcommunity norms.
108. The script was written in the Python 3 programming language by Andrew Korzhuev, a student in the Information Sciences Department at the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology, in March 2010. The script is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 and I am happy to share it along with the data it collected. This data collection was possible because the Daily Kos site maintains an open, publicly searchable archive of posts, comments, and recommendations, all of which are licensed by the site owners for reproduction and reuse.
109. This operational definition builds on the arguments of Clayman and Reisner, who argued that gatekeeping encompassed both the process by which gatekeepers managed the flow of a given resource (e.g., publication in a newspaper) as well as the criteria that determined patterns of selection (e.g., "newsworthiness").
110. Clayman and Reisner, "Gatekeeping in Action," especially 179-180.
111. Shaw and Benkler elaborate on this point as well as its implications for political blogging in the networked public sphere in "A Tale of Two Blogospheres.".
112. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.
113. Note that I define each of these variables as well as the statistical methods used for this analysis in greater detail later in the paper.
114. This is substantially less than major news outlets like Huffington Post (980 million page views, 35 million unique visitors) or The New York Times (400 million page views, 2 million visitors), but neither of these sites offer anything close to the participatory infrastructure that Daily Kos does. What is more, in years of congressional and presidential elections, traffic to Daily Kos typically surges. Page view and visitor data taken from Google AdPlanner on October 2011, http://google.com/adplanner. Regarding the history of Daily Kos, see Armstrong and Moulitsas Zeniga, Crashing the Gate.
115. For more on the netroots, see Kerbel, Netroots. Also, on Daily Kos, see Karpf, "The MoveOn Effect." It bears note that several of the site editors have publicly repudiated the idea that the site is truly radical. In a personal communication about this paper, Laura Clawson, a contributing editor to the site since 2006, underscored this point to me.
116. For a comparison of collaborative practices on the left and right of the U.S. political blogosphere, see Shaw and Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres."
117. The platform, called "Scoop," was originally developed by Rusty Foster for the "Kuro5in" (pronounced "corrosion"), discussion forum, which is geared towards computer programming and related interests, http://www.kuro5in.org, accessed April 3, 2010.
118. Armstrong and Moulitsas Ziga, Crashing the Gate.
119. At the beginning of 2011, Daily Kos deployed a completely transformed interface- dubbed "DK4"-that incorporates a number of new features. As this article was already under review at that time, I do not incorporate any discussion of the DK4 features into my analysis.
120. User data from http://dailykos.com. During 2008, the site generated between 500,000 and 2 million hits daily. Traffic data from aggregate statistics collected by "The Truth Laid Bear," http://www.ttlb.com and Nielsen's "Blogpulse" service, http://www.blogpulse.com. The mean daily traffic at this time was around 600,000 hits.
121. "About Daily Kos," accessed March 27, 2010, http://dailykos.com/special/about2.
122. Armstrong and Moulitsas Zúñiga, Crashing the Gate; and Marcos Moulitsas Zúñiga, Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era (New York: Penguin, 2008).
123. Several examples of this arise in the threads discussed below. See, in particular, Moulitsas' post in response to the writers' strike. Also, this kind of rhetoric emerges repeatedly in Moulitsas' books: Armstrong and Moulitsas Zúñiga, Crashing the Gate; and Moulitsas Zúñiga, Taking On the System.
124. I am not aware of any means by which site participants can "recall" an editor from her position.
125. The Scoop platform computes whether users are trusted using an algorithm customized by Moulitsas and the site's chief technical officer, Jeremy Bingham. The details of this algorithm are secret to prevent users from gaming the system and acquiring trusted status too easily.
126. Barzilai-Nahon, "Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping"
127. Barzilai-Nahon, "Gatekeeping: A Critical Review".
128. Clayman and Reisner, "Gatekeeping in Action".
129. Lewin, "Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Equilibria and Social Change".
130. Shoemaker and Vos, Gatekeeping Theory.
131. Thomas F. Gieryn, "Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists." American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 781-795.
132. Clayman and Reisner, "Gatekeeping in Action."
133. The site elites were far from unanimous in their support for Obama. Of the (at the time) 26 individuals identified as site elites, at least one publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton and another voted for John Edwards in the primaries. See: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/1/428108/-My-Vote-1-8-08; and http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/5/450060/-Im-For-Hillary-Clinton. Thanks to Laura Clawson, one of the Daily Kos editors, who pointed me to this information in a personal email exchange.
134. "Writers' Strike at DailyKos," accessed December 17, 2010, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/14/20827/4727/132/476843.
135. "The Clinton civil war," accessed December 17, 2010, http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/17/12417/1285/527/478498.
136. Karpf, "The MoveOn Effect," for an example where Moulitsas banned users for promoting the idea that the U.S. government had been behind the September 11 attacks.
137. The full comment thread, including all quotations I use below, can be found at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/13/85118/7425 (accessed April 28, 2012).
138. "Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday," http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/5/104652/3850.
139. joan reports has participated since 2004, contributing thousands of comments and diaries.
140. I use Bonacich centrality in this case because it operationalizes a relational concept of influence where the value of someone's attention or recommendation is measured in turn by who recommends their contributions.
141. Phillip Bonacich, "Power and Centrality: A Family of Measures," The American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 5 (1987): 1170-1182.
142. Approximating eigenvector centrality scores, I set the attenuation parameter equal to 3/4 the inverse of the maximum eigenvalue of the user-recommendation adjacency matrix. In this case, that value β = 9.85 x 10-6. The use of such small, positive β results in centrality scores that slightly reward individuals whose comments have more recommendations from individuals whose comments have also received many recommendations.
143. The logic of inquiry guiding these analyses follows Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
144. Carter T. Butts, "Social Network Analysis: A Methodological Introduction," Asian Journal Of Social Psychology 11, no. 1 (2008): 13-41.
145. Roger Koenker, Quantile Regression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
146. Roger Koenker and Kevin F. Hallock, "Quantile Regression," The Journal of Economic Perspectives 15, no. 4 (2001): 143-156.
147. Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, "Power Law Distribution of the World Wide Web," Science 287 (2000): 2115
148. Jean Laherr "Distributions de type "fractal parabolique" dans la Nature," Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Série II a: Sciences de la Terre et des Planétes 7 (1996): 535-541.
149. For the purposes of interpretation, note that I use the natural logarithm of the dependent variable as well as several of the independent variables. These results are robust to the inclusion of interaction and quadratic terms.
150. Tilly, "Relational Origins of Inequality": 362.
151. Tilly makes this argument in a discussion of how the emergence of credit made reputation "crucial to commercial viability" (356).
152. Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw, "Weapon of the Strong Revisited? The Internet, Young Adults, and Political Engagement," Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA), Chicago, 2011.
153. Jen Schradie, "The Digital Production Gap: The Digital Divide and Web 2.0 Collide," Poetics 39, no. 2 (2011): 145-168.
154. This sort of "benevolent dictatorship" is a common organizational structure in online collectives. See Weber, The Success of Open Source on the role of Linus Torvalds in history and organization of the Linux kernel development. As Weber argues, strong norms of meritocracy as well as the strict technical demands of creating a functional computer operating system are reasons this autocratic mode of governance retains legitimacy, despite its obvious contradictions with the egalitarian and communitarian ethos underpinning open source and online collaboration.
155. Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell, "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics," Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (2010):141-157.
156. Aaron Smith, The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008.
157. The Pew Research Center, Internet & American Life Project (2009), http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/6--The-Internets-Role-in-Campaign-2008.aspx; and Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, Weapon of the Strong?
158. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.
159. Shaw and Benkler, "A Tale of Two Blogospheres."
160. Discussions of this process can be found in both.
161. Judd Antin and Coye Cheshire, "Readers are not free-riders," Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '10 (2010):127-130.
162. Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman, "The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation," AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction 1, no. 1 (2009): 13-32.