Muted Group Theory - Muted Group Theory and The Internet

Muted Group Theory and The Internet

Kramarae has performed research about the internet to examine if men gatekeep and control such a widely used device. Kramarae’s research leads to the belief that the traditional set up of the muted group theory exists on the internet as well. Almost all of the original creators of the internet in the 1970s and 1980s were male. Today there is about a 50/50 split on internet usage between men and women. However, all of the bones of the software and the setup of the internet is seen as masculine. Men also dominate technology fields causing women to continue being marginalized. Many of the metaphors used to describe the internet are masculine. These masculine terms such as information superhighway, new frontier, and global community affect the way that the muted group feels about the internet. Kramarae believes that the internet is on track to being more evenly balanced between males and females. She thinks with the advances of blogs, wikis, and online education that females will have a stronger voice (p. 457-458). They are able to voice their opinions in varied forms of technology and can relate to other women in their own way.

Barzilai-Nahon’s Network Gatekeeper Theory (NGT), whose theory helps bring the gatekeeping concept into the networked world. Barzilai-Nahon was driven to develop NGT because traditional gatekeeping literature ignored the role of the gated thus failing to recognise the dynamism of the gatekeeping environment. Most relevant herein is not only was NGT developed specifically with the Internet in mind, but it moves gatekeeping from a traditional focus on information ‘selection’, ‘processes’, ‘distribution’ and ‘intermediaries’ to ‘information control’:

• Finally, a context of information and networks makes it necessary to re-examine the vocabulary of gatekeeping, moving from processes of selection (Communication), information distribution and protection (Information Science), and information intermediary (Management Science) to a more flexible construct of information control, allowing inclusion of more types of information handling that have occurred before and new types which occur due to networks.

NGT helps identify the processes and mechanisms used for gatekeeping, and most particularly highlights information control as the thread that ties the various online gatekeeperstogether. Under NGT, an act of gatekeeping involves a gatekeeper and gated, the movement of information through a gate, and the use of a gatekeeping process and mechanism. A gatekeeping process involves doing some of the following: selecting, channelling, shaping, manipulating and deleting information. For example, a gatekeeping process might involve selecting which information to publish, or channelling information through a channel, or deleting information by removing it, or shaping information into a particular form. Her taxonomy of mechanisms for gatekeeping is particularly useful. The mechanisms include, for example, channelling (i.e. search engines, hyperlinks), censorship (i.e. filtering, blocking, zoning), value-added (i.e. customisation tools), infrastructure (i.e. network access), user interaction (i.e. default homepages, hypertext links), and editorial mechanisms (i.e. technical controls, information content).