Although the word imformavore was new to me when I ran across it on the web recently, it turns out that I myself have always had these tendencies. Here's a definition of the term:
The term informavore ... 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...coined the term in 1983 as an analogy to how organisms survive by consuming negative entropy ...."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." (see: Wikepedia)
Until the emergence of the web, I have always considered libraries as my second home and was quite content to wander through the shelves, pulling books at random, and briefly scanning the titles and a few pages for bits of information. Information grazing if you will. The idea of the informavore calls to mind the discussion in recent months on the web about whether the web search engine Google was making us stupid. All of this angst was precipitated by Nick Carr who blogs over at Rough Type. The underlying idea is that web search has now been made so efficient and painless that we seek out snippets of information the same way that squirrels search for nuts. Some conclude pessimistically that we have lost our capability to leisurely consume the linear content of printed books.
The term informavore apparently refers to someone who acquires information anywhere, whether on the web or the printed page. The Google/stupid dialogue focuses on only web search. I personally acquire information via both the printed page and the web. If I am trying to understand some new idea quickly, however, I always turn to the web. For me, this is a matter of efficiency. Of course, there is a downside to being an informavore -- information fatigue syndrome. The cure for this latter condition is well understood.
Comments