The questions surrounding who will ensure that online information remains accessible and authoritative have received much attention in recent months. Concerns range from European unease that a new book digitization partnership might result in an American-skewed repository of digital books, to apprehension over the Chinese government's near-ubiquitous control of its country's search engines and Web sites. This debate over ensuring freedom of access and accuracy of information—and who will assume the role of gatekeeper—has raised old problems in new technological contexts.

Regarding the situation in China, Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communications studies at Northwestern University, says, "It's a good and important reminder there has always been government intervention with respect to media uses across societies over time." Hargittai, who specializes in researching how users interact with search engines and how that affects information dissemination, says the issues surrounding access are far more complex than worries about US-based technologies overrunning the world or supplying students with computers to mitigate the digital divide.

"I think people, especially in the early years of the Internet, thought of it as this utopian, above-the-law entity, which now, in much more concrete ways, we know it is not," Hargittai says.

On a global scale, the institutionalization of digitizing technologies—and the effect these efforts have in proliferating a given viewpoint—might be splitting along sociopolitical and geographical ideologies.

In December 2004, Google announced a book-digitizing partnership with the libraries at Harvard and Stanford universities, the University of Michigan, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library. The announcement raised concerns in Europe that American-based technology, in this case Google's search algorithms, would shortchange European materials when users performed a search. By May 2005, the European Commission had announced its own digitizing project (http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do), which included nearly 100 million Euros for research and development of both search engine and digitization technologies. Such differing approaches mirror larger national cultures, Hargittai says. For example, European nations spend much more subsidizing arts and culture, while the US tends to rely on private initiatives such as the Google-library partnerships.

Additionally, cultural and political differences have affected American technology companies doing business in China and in nations such as France and Germany, which have attempted to limit access to Web sites connected to far-right wing and neo-Nazi groups. For example, in 2000, French courts banned Yahoo (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google) from allowing French users to visit auction sites that included Nazi memorabilia. More recently, Microsoft's MSN Spaces service on its new Chinese portal prohibits bloggers from entering words such as "democracy" to label their Web sites.

However, the promise of blogs to seep through censorship walls such as China's is becoming a major topic of discussion among technology-savvy journalists and bloggers. An editorial opinion piece (http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/24/opinion/edkristof.php) published 24 May 2005 by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times might have been the first piece of writing to inform a mass audience about how to use Web blogs to sidestep official or de facto sanctions.

Kristof's column, which ended by saying "the leadership itself is digging the Communist Party's grave, by giving the Chinese people broadband," was deemed overly optimistic by several bloggers who had lived and worked in China. Regardless, it informed millions of nontechnical readers that blogs are now a significant enough force to have captured the imagination of those with the most power to combat official censorship—columnists and opinion makers such as Kristof.

Recent Chinese blog activities quickly turned into a real-time cat-and-mouse game of disseminating or shutting off banned speech. As of 30 June 2005, the Chinese government requires all Web sites and blogs to be officially registered (http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14010); otherwise, they'll shut them down. Yet, in an effort to escape official scrutiny, bloggers have initiated an "adopt-a-blog" strategy in which Chinese bloggers can post their writing to servers located outside China (www.technorati.com/tag/adoptablog, http://projab.jot.com/WikiHome).

How effective the unofficial bloggers' efforts will be in maintaining a window into China is a matter of debate among Western China-watchers. Longtime blogger and anticensorship activist Seth Finkelstein doubts that blogs alone will significantly alter the Chinese power structure.

"There are always people who win some victories under the present system, but I'm very much against technological determinism—the idea that blogs are going to overthrow the government of China," Finkelstein says. "The idea that suddenly technological change will give a huge advantage to one side is [an] extremely dubious proposition."

The issues of who might or might not be a gatekeeper and what role gatekeepers should play go beyond these well-publicized national and continental tiffs into subtle cultural nuances that don't receive wider discussion. For example, in many small and medium-sized towns and cities in the US, the most authoritative voice of information is the daily newspaper, which is a monopoly in the vast majority of cases. If the paper is controlled by a particularly ideological owner who skews editorial opinion pages heavily to one side of the political spectrum, then that paper's readership is being denied a wide range of views in their most accessible and familiar local outlet. This de facto censorship rarely, however, raises concerns outside a small circle of libertarian writers or journalism scholars.

How to introduce new voices into these often restrictive paradigms at local, regional, and national levels is preoccupying many media and technology figures. Jon Garfunkel's blog Civilites.net (http://civilities.net/About) explores the discussion surrounding his concept of "constructing informative viewpoints." He recently posted an eight-part series on "the new gatekeepers," those A-list new media figures whose work is being most widely read.

In contrast to the gatekeepers in China, who Garfunkel says employ "active filtering and active censorship," he looks at gatekeepers from the viewpoint of influence: "They are people and entities that influence what is read, what is permeated throughout the culture." In the US, "you can find anything, but it's a lot of information. It's really supply-driven, and it's a question of which messages get out, which perspectives get discussed," he says.

Hargittai—who is on Garfunkel's list of influential figures—says we're not sufficiently ensuring the availability of a wide range of views. She doesn't blame censorship; rather, she contends that so much attention has been placed on providing simple access to the Internet that providing the necessary skills to make full use of it has gone begging.

"I look at what the average user does online," she says. "An important factor to remember is that people's skills differ considerably in using search engines. So you can go to Google and still not do very well in your search." A lot of people, she says, don't think to type in more than one term in a query, for example.

"People who have the high-level skills will be able to find the alternative voices, whereas a lot of average users might not, so we're creating different levels of inequality with respect to access to different types of information," Hargittai says.

According to Garfunkel, this is a problem of trust: "A lot of users do not have the same sense as people who do this every day, who are compulsive searchers of information and know how to tell what is accepted as meeting certain criteria such as whether it's objective and authoritative." He says this problem will continue to evolve.

A dominant factor in that evolution will be the ongoing debate over the "old media" values of expertise and editorial procedure and how these values will merge with the shoot-from-the-hip blogging culture. Garfunkel says (http://civilities.net/TheNewGatekeepers-Values) the latter favors freedom over responsibility, anonymity over traceability, talking over listening, and ego over deference.

For society to fully take advantage of advanced search and user-friendly publishing technologies, Garfunkel says, these values will have to learn to coexist. Information will need to be posted in accessible forums, and people will still crave content that is recognized as having the qualities that make an entertaining and enlightening read as well as the gravitas to engender trust. He cited several attempts to create local news blogs in the Washington, D.C. (http://www.backfence.com/), and Boston (http://www.universalhub.com/) areas.

"The irony about these things is they have no gatekeepers, they have no influential people, they have no personality so far," says Garfunkel. He doesn't say gatekeepers are good or bad, just that "people happen to like them, and we haven't had enough experiments in truly distributed information, distributed news. That still hasn't happened."