There will be two theories that I will be discussing and thy also coincide with each other, those two theories are Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting. Firstly, there is Gatekeeping, Gatekeeping was a theory started in 1947 by a social psychologist named Kurt Lewin. It is defined as "The activity of trying to control who gets particular resources, power, or opportunities, and who does not". In more simple terms, the media chooses what information gets released and which does not. This is used as a filter in order to maintain a particular bias. Gatekeeping is mainly about control and making sure the majority of people have a skewed opinion on a certain idea, person, situation, etc. This implies that essentially Gatekeeping is bad and this affects society more than people realize.
More specifically, we see this everyday through various forms of Social Media. Social Media has become the main form of communication among news rooms, media and journalists. We tend to see journalists posting stories using specific language, presentation, and even carefully choosing which sources are linked in the article to draw the reader in to frame their opinion. This is one of many examples where we see how Gatekeeping is doing more harm than good in any situation.
Gatekeeping is definitely seen as classist and racist in one form or another. In my generation it is seen as blocking people out and only allowing a "close knit" community to experience or have something. One term that is used often that I have seen is the phrase "nepo baby", for people unfamiliar with the term it is a child of a celebrity that have very successful careers because of their famous parents. We see this all of the time, including in the infamous show Euphoria where actress Maude Apatow who stars as Lexi in the show. In real time, Maude's parents are comedian Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann, many people did not know that those were Maude's parents and this information went viral across all social media. Rumors sparked that maybe Maude did not deserve this role and could have taken it away from someone who was more deserving than she was. Since she grew up wealthy and already has parents in the industry which helps her chances of getting that role significantly rather than someone who was just starting out and does not have someone already in the industry. That is only one of the many examples where people see this as Gatekeeping in one of many forms.
Now getting into the social media part of it, how does this influence Generation Z? There is a new social media platform once known as musically now referred to as Tiktok. This platform allows a new job called influencers, this job entails endorsing different products and working with various brands but mostly makeup companies. The problem with this issue in my generation is the people who usually end up becoming influencers are white, blonde, skinny, and blue eyed. It does not have much room for minorities to have a say in these jobs or products because their videos do not get shown as much as what can people see as "ideal". Luckily, there are people attempting to break this toxic cycle and have influencers from all different types of backgrounds, body type, skin color and much more.
Secondly, there is Agenda Setting, this was first theorized by Dr. Maxwell McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw. It is the "ability to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda", the media uses Agenda Setting to essentially communicate what issues are important and relevant. There are three types of Agenda Setting, 1. Public Agenda Setting, this is where the public determines which stories are important 2. Media Agenda Setting: it is when the media decides which agenda for stories is important and lastly 3. Policy Agenda Setting, both public and media agenda's influence the public policy makers. This implies that Agenda Setting is relatively good, it only brings to light what people think are the most pressing issues at this time, but this can also be seen as a negative. There is a possibility that other problems might get overlooked and in doing that they get increasingly worse.
This is extremely prevalent in our society today, Agenda Setting determines where we focus our attention to and Gatekeeping will frame our opinion on that certain issue. Both of these theories have their positive traits along with their downfalls. Like it or not we have these theories and they will continue to remain in our society.
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