An Illustrated Introduction to the Infosphere

Abstract

This introduction to Luciano Floridi's philosophy of information (PI) provides a short overview of Floridi's work and its reception by the library and information studies (LIS) community, brief definitions of some important PI concepts, and illustrations of Floridi's three suggested applications of PI to library and information studies. It suggests that LIS may just be as important to PI as PI is to LIS in terms of deepening our mutual understanding of information ontologies, the dynamics of informational domains, and the variety of evolving relationships among information organisms and information objects.

Still Minding the Gap? Reflecting on Transitions between Concepts of Information in Varied Domains

“…Floridi's PI has been particularly extensively analysed within the LIS discipline, and indeed proposed as a suitable theoretical foundation for that domain: for overviews, see [62,112], and for examples of individual contributions to the debate, see [104,[113][114][115][116]. This is the only example of one of the general theories from philosophy being adopted within, and potentially contributed to by, a discipline other than the one in which it was developed.…”

The Social Informatics of Ignorance

“…Early suggestions that information science should consider exploring agnotology were made by Ojala () and Van der Veer Martens (), both of whom focus on the philosophy of information in the era of the Internet. Frazier () appears to have brought Proctor's typology of conceptions of ignorance into the information science literature, suggesting intersections and distinctions between agnotology and elements of Chatman's theory of information poverty (Chatman, ).…”

Curating the infosphere

“…Indeed, Van der Veer Martens (2015) suggests that this may be one of the ways in which LIS may contribute to PI: the variety of types of documents dealt with by LIS may lead to a helpful revision an extension of the ontology of information within PI.…”

“…Floridi had actually drawn attention to the consequences for libraries at a very early stage, although, as Van der Veer Martens (2015) points out, it went largely unnoticed by anyone in LIS: ".. the library itself may disappear, as we move from the holding and lending library, which stores knowledge physically recorded on paper, to the consulting library, which provides access to electronic information on the network ... finally from the library as a building to the library as a gate node in the virtual space of the digital encyclopedia" (Floridi 1995, p. 264). [Floridi (2010) tells us that he came upon the idea of PI on the banks of the Cherwell in Oxford in the summer of 1998; it seems that his thoughts on libraries may have played some part in its formulation.]…”

“…These two papers alone have been cited more than 200 times, and we make no attempt to comment on all these instances of the reception, preferring to focus selectively on some main themes; see Van der Veer Martens (2015) for more detailed commentary.…”