Infonaut

The word "infonaut" was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book "Tools for Thought: the history and future of mind-expanding technology" in 1985. In Chapter One he describes "infonauts" as "the youngest generation, the ones who are exploring the cognitive domains we all soon experience" (p.15), or as "the older brothers and sisters of the adolescent hackers you read about in the papers. Most of them are in their twenties and thirties. They work for themselves or for some research institution or software house, and represent the first members of the McLuhan generation to use the technology invented by the von Neumann generation as tools to extend their imagination. From the science of designing what they call the "user interface" — where mind meets machine — to the art of building educational microworlds, the infonauts have been using their new medium to create the mass-media version we will use fifteen years from now." (p.23)

According to Wolfgang Heller an infonaut is a person with high information literacy and technical skills to navigate into and access information in the infosphere. Coined by Luciano Floridi on the basis of biosphere, the infosphere denotes 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.

During his tenure at Apple Computer, John Sculley often used the term and Donald Buffamanti (now CEO and Founder of AutoSpies.com) who was the Technical Advisor to the President of Apple Canada (J. David Rae) was first to use the name, for a company in 1989. He named his technology consulting firm Infonaut Incorporated after being inspired after Sculley autographed a copy of his book 'Odyssey' with the line… "Welcome to the ranks of the new Infonaut's'.

In 2006 the word Infonaut was nominated by The Global Language Monitor (GLM) as one of the top ten words of 2006. GLM defines Infonaut as "those who blithely travel along the ‘infobahn’."

The word infobahn was introduced in the early 1990s, "Infobahn" to describe the information superhighway. Infobahn is formed along the German autobahn, the word for a Swiss, German or Austrian motorway, made up of auto (motor) and bahn (highway). An information network on the Infobahn became an infonet. A computer-based information system became an infosystem and an infonaut would travel on such a system in order to hunt information.