Informavore

Informavore

The term informavore (also spelled informivore) characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. George A. Miller [ Citation
last = Miller | first = George A.
authorlink = George Armitage Miller
contribution = Informavores
pages = 111-113
title = The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages
publisher = Wiley-Interscience
editor-last = Machlup
editor-first = Fritz
editor2-last = Mansfield
editor2-first = Una
year = 1983
isbn = 047188717X ] coined the term in 1983 as an analogy to how organisms survive by consuming negative entropy (as suggested by Erwin Schrödinger [ Citation
last = Schrödinger | first = Erwin
authorlink = Erwin Schrödinger
title = What is Life?
publisher = Cambridge University Press
year = 1944
isbn = 0521427088 ] ). Miller states, "Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, "all higher organisms are informavores"."

An early use of the term was in a newspaper article by Jonathan Chevreau [ Citation
last = Chevreau
first = Jonathan
title = Some A1 applications wishful thinking
newspaper = The Globe and Mail
pages =
year = 1984
date = 1984-03-30 ] where he quotes a speech made by Zenon Pylyshyn. Soon after, the term appeared in the introduction of Pylyshyn's seminal book on Cognitive Science, "Computation and Cognition" [ Citation
last = Pylyshyn | first = Zenon
authorlink = Zenon Pylyshyn
title = Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science
publisher = MIT Press
year = 1984
isbn = 0-262-16098-6 ] .

More recently the term has been popularized by philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book "Kinds of Minds" [ Citation
last = Dennett | first = Daniel
authorlink = Daniel Dennett
title = Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness
publisher = Basic Books
year = 1997
isbn = 0465073514] and by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker [Citation
title = World Wide Words: Informavore
url = http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-inf3.htm
accessdate = 2008-01-12 ] .

ee also

* Infornography

References

External links

* [http://www.wordspy.com/words/informavore.asp "informavore"] at Word Spy


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