Framing this question within Fitzpatrick, information circulates through various gatekeeping mechanisms before it's considered worthy within the field, at least this is the way it was thought of during the era of printing. Now, however, Fitzpatrick recognizes that information is being widely circulated via tools on the Internet such as blogs, which have in some ways uprooted journalism, Wikipedia, and others. "For this reason, peer review needs to be put not in the service of gatekeeping, or determining what should be published for any scholar to see, but of filtering, or determining what of the vast amount of material that has been published is of interest or value to a particular scholar. As Clay Shirky has argued, 'Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter'” (Fitzpatrick 16). We are still trying to develop methods of coping with the amount of information and sorting out the "junk" from the "good." Fitzpatrick ties in Michael Jensen's ideas for a "rubric of authority": "However, while such 'trust metrics' might seem inappropriate as a model for reconsidering peer review, they may nonetheless help point us in the direction of a more sophisticated, partially computational, partially review-based system for determining authority in networked scholarly publishing, the kind of model Michael Jensen imagines under the rubric of 'Authority 3.0' ...first is that it must be as non-manipulable as possible, preventing the importation of in-group favoritism, logrolling, and other interpersonal abuses from traditional peer review into the new system. Second, the system must achieve a critical mass of participation, and thus will need to operate within an ethos of “quid pro quo”; in contrast with Slashdot’s system, in which users earn the right to become reviewers by publishing within the system, scholars must earn the right to publish within these new electronic publishing networks by actively serving as reviewers. And finally, and most significantly: the key activity of such a peer-to-peer review system must be not the review of texts, but the review of the reviewers. It is the reviewers, after all, that a reader within such a network needs to trust, and as Jonathan Schwartz, the COO of Sun Microsystems, has argued in numerous interviews, “trust is the currency of the participation age"  (Fitzpatrick 16).

 

Fitzpatrick uses a variety of examples that show how important medium can be for the circulation of information. For instance, she writes about Wardrip-Fruin's experience with publishing his work in blog format as a way of circulating it among readers whose opinions his valued and trusted (16). She suggests that the comments Wardrip-Fruin received were more useful than offical reviewers' comments because of his pre-existing relationships with the readers who commented on his work. This type of exchange would be less likely to take place in a print medium. However, Fitzpatrick also provides examples that show the difficult of circulating information digitally. The journal _Philica_ is a good example of this problem, in that information is uploaded but not appropriately tagged or sorted to facilitate users' finding the type of information they might be looking for (17). In this example, the medium both facilitates information circulation and impedes users' abilities to easily locate particular pieces of information.

 

I would argue that the use of the Internet as a means of information circulation assuages some anxieties about originality, the enormity of the contribution, etc. In other words, Internet as distributor is slowly changing our intellectual values associated to publication and originality; we, as writers, users, and amateurs, can add very quickly to a conversation a small bit of information and it be considered valuable. These small contributions from individual users adds up to something greater such as Wikipedia. "...the key to avoiding the group-think Sunstein fears is not heightened intellectual individualism — separating oneself from the network — but paradoxically placing the advancement of the community’s knowledge ahead of one’s own personal advancement" (Fitzpatrick 17). This selfless writing, creating, and composing wasn't possible nor desirable before the advent of Web 2.0. There is, however, the problem of access.

 

The use of blogs is another way that the circulation of information of changing. Through commenting and versioning, bloggers can continue to work on (compose and revise) texts rather than aiming to complete a finished product (like a monograph). In this way, information circulates from blogger to readers, readers respond, bloggers take up these responses, and the information changes as the conversation continues. These examples show that we might be moving away from a model in which we understand information as concrete, finished details towards one in which information is always under revision.

 

Molz demonstrates that medium plays a crucial role in how we find, revise, and circulate information by showing how interactive travelers use mobile technologies to share information with friends, family, and other interested members of the public. Whereas traveling was previously (17th & 18th c) considered a solitary activity, mobile technologies have now made traveling a collaborative and interactive experience. Travelers locate information about where to go, with whom to stay, what to eat and see, and so on while they are moving about. In this way, the circulation of information via mobile technologies structures what travelers are able to see and know about the world. Similarly, travelers logging their experiences via blogs and sites like couchsurfer.org or wikitravel also circulate information that would not be available through other mediums.

 

I think it's important to note that information that is digitally-circulated is able to be circulated, in part, because it is transferred and situated among physical forms of media (that are in situ or tangibly-located). That is to say, one of the marks of (early) digital age information transmission and circulation is that the virtual is married to the the tangible, and vice versa. This marriage is evidence of an emergent form of communication meeting and working in tandem with a previously-established, tried-and-true form of communication. For example, a student sees a flyer pinned on a board on his/her college campus advertising an event hosted by an academic fraternity. The basic information is there; for further information, they can scan the QR code to access the informational site. It's tangible and digital media working alongside one another. More specifically, print media is

pointing to digital media (and there seems to be a trend here; tangible media points to digital media more often than digital media points to tangible media). But both forms of media are working together to move information around from person to person.

 

We seem to be focusing on digital avenues of circulation, but information is still circulated via analog means: print still exists, broadcast media, and speech are a few off the top of my head. While advocating for new ways of thinking about writing, reading, and publishing, Fitzgerald (sic.) avoids a technological determinist stance, positioning herself between saying that these technologies by themselves will revolutionize our social practices and that computers have no effect on our living. Instead, she notes that our practices and technologies define each other, as Shirky and others have also argued. In this view, we can come to a couple of simple answers to this prompt: information circulates because people choose which information is important to circulate and then select an audience that is appropriate for that circulation. However, how will that information be circulated? By a medium, of course. Media are absolutely necessary for information to circulate; otherwise, information couldn’t be transmitted between any two individuals, let alone among large groups. But that’s not to say that media are the messages. The medium we are working in certainly shapes the messages we convey in them: a visual medium like video has different conventions and audience expectations than a print essay, so the while the message might have the same content, their presentation will be different depending on the medium we are working within. So while media are absolutely necessary to circulation, they do not define it. There must be a human input into the medium in order to have an output with which an audience can make knowledge from the information presented.