Infosphere

Infosphere is a metaphysical realm of information, data, knowledge, and communication, populated by informational entities called inforgs (or, informational organisms).^[1] Infosphere is portmanteau of information and -sphere.

Though one example is

The first documented use of the infosphere was in 1970 by Kenneth E. Boulding,^[3] who viewed it as one among the six "spheres" in his own system (the others being the sociosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere). Boulding claimed:

[T]he infosphere...consists of inputs and outputs of conversation, books, television, radio, speeches, church services, classes, and lectures as well as information received from the physical world by personal observation.... It is clearly a segment of the sociosphere in its own right, and indeed it has considerable claim to dominate the other segments. It can be argued that development of any kind is essentially a learning process and that it is primarily dependent on a network of information flows.^{[4]: 15–6}

In 1971, the term was used in a Time Magazine book review by R.Z. Sheppard, who wrote:^[5]

In much the way that fish cannot conceptualize water or birds the air, man barely understands his infosphere, that encircling layer of electronic and typographical smog composed of cliches from journalism, entertainment, advertising and government.

In 1980, it was used by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave, in which he writes:

What is inescapably clear, whatever we choose to believe, is that we are altering our infosphere fundamentally...we are adding a whole new strata of communication to the social system. The emerging Third Wave infosphere makes that of the Second Wave era - dominated by its mass media, the post office, and the telephone - seem hopelessly primitive by contrast.

Toffler's definition proved to be prophetic, as the use of infosphere in the 1990s expanded beyond media to speculate about the common evolution of the Internet, society and culture. In his book Digital Dharma, Steven Vedro writes:

In the animated sitcom Futurama, the Infosphere is a huge sphere floating in space, in which a species of giant, talking, floating brains attempts to store all of the information known in the universe.^{[citation needed]}

The

• Noosphere
• Semiosphere
• Ideosphere
• Simulated reality
• Umwelt

References