Gatekeepers and Media

Gatekeepers

A typical work day for me starts with a five minute walk to the train. The first thing I grab is the free AM newspaper. This is the first gatekeeper encounter of the day, as I am sure everything or mostly everything has been sugar-coated. Some stories may be true, some other may be incomplete, but the fact of the matter is that we do not want to hear too much about anything. Gatekeepers number two, my bosses. Today, they decided that every single one of their phone calls would get dispatched to me. In addition to being a receptionist, I also had to work on what they called “A set of very easy projects.” One of the projects consisted in finding logos and pictures of certain products that were needed for a sales pitch presentation. Gatekeeper number three comes around --- the IT department’s secret weapon “Websense.”

Websense is a program that blocks many Websites that are not related to work. I communicated my problem to the IT department, but they cannot help me because the rules are set within the program. Easy project? I do not think so. I had already encountered gatekeepers and mechanical noise in short period of time. What a great day!

Up until about ten to fifteen years ago our social networking was mostly based on interpersonal communications. Aside from the phone and letters, the only other way to communicate with someone was to be next to or near each other. Now with existence of the Internet, which is characterized by broad social networking and anonymous communication, our interaction has strictly limited the interpersonal communication between the source and the receiver. The better you know someone, the better you will be able to selectively and efficiently communicate with them. In other words, the source constructs messages in such a way in that they already anticipate the feedback they are most likely to receive depending on the content and desired effect of the message.

Technology has influenced our relationships by creating a bigger medium, which serves as a gatekeeper, and a mechanical noise that can either help in transferring messages faster, or cause a dilemma by adding obstacles that prevent the message from accurately reaching the receiver. I deal with this aspect of communication everyday when reaching out to co-workers through corporate instant messaging. This form of technology comes in handy because it allows co-workers to communicate and multitask. When people