Infosphere is a term used since the 1990s to speculate about the common evolution of internet, society and culture. It is a neologism composed of information and sphere. This article is about evolution in biology. ... For other uses, see Society (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Culture (disambiguation). ... A neologism (Greek νεολογισμός [neologismos], from νέος [neos] new + λόγος [logos] word, speech, discourse + suffix -ισμός [-ismos] -ism) is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (coined) — often to apply to new concepts, to synthesize pre-existing concepts, or to make older terminology sound more contemporary. ... The ASCII codes for the word Wikipedia represented in binary, the numeral system most commonly used for encoding computer information. ... A sphere is a symmetrical geometrical object. ...

Emerging from what French philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the shared noosphere of collective human thought, invention and spiritual seeking, the Infosphere is sometimes used to conceptualise a field that engulfs our physical, mental and etheric bodies; it affects our dreaming and our cultural life. Our evolving nervous system has been extended, as media sage Marshall McLuhan predicted in the early 1960s, into a global embrace. The noosphere can be seen as the sphere of human thought being derived from the Greek νους (nous) meaning mind in the style of atmosphere and biosphere. In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere... “McLuhan” redirects here. ...

The term was used by Dan Simmons in the science-fiction saga Hyperion (published 1989) to indicate what the Internet could become in the future: a place parallel, virtual, formed of billions of networks, with "artificial life" on various scales, from what is equivalent to an insect (small programs) to what is equivalent to a god (artificial intelligences), whose motivations are divers: to help mankind or on the contrary to harm mankind? Dan Simmons (born April 4, 1948 in Peoria, Illinois) is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Hyperion and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion. ... For the song from The Rocky Horror Show, see Science Fiction/Double Feature. ... Hyperion The Hyperion Cantos form a tetralogy of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. ...

The term has also been used by Luciano Floridi, on the basis of biosphere, to denote the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities (thus including informational agents as well), their properties, interactions, processes and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from cyberspace (which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were), since it also includes off-line and analogue spaces of information. According to Floridi, it is possible to equate the Infosphere to the totality of Being. This equation leads him to an informational ontology. Luciano Floridi (Laurea, Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, M.Phil. ... A false-color composite of global oceanic and terrestrial photoautotroph abundance, from September 1997 to August 2000. ... It has been suggested that Virtual world be merged into this article or section. ... In ontology, a being is anything that can be said to be, either transcendantly or immanently. ...

See also

• Simulated reality

Simulated reality is the idea that reality could be simulated — often computer-simulated — to a degree indistinguishable from true reality. ...

External links

• Steven Vedro "The Infosphere and the Esoteric: Exploring the Inner Metaphors of Telecommunications Technologies"*
• L. Floridi, A Look into the Future Impact of ICT on our Lives
• Preface of L. Floridi, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction. London/New York: Routledge, 1999.
• L. Floridi Ethics in the Infosphere