The Information Society and Its Philosophy: Introduction to the Special Issue on “The Philosophy of Information, Its Nature, and Future Developments”

Abstract

The article introduces the special issue dedicated to “The Philosophy of Information, Its Nature, and Future Developments.” It outlines the origins of the information society and then briefly discusses the definition of the philosophy of information, the possibility of reconciling nature and technology, the informational turn as a fourth revolution (after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), and the metaphysics of the infosphere.

Keywords:

• fourth revolution
• infosphere
• philosophy of information
• philosophy of technology

Notes

1. A typical life cycle includes the following phases: occurring (discovering, designing, authoring, etc.), processing and managing (collecting, validating, modifying, organizing, indexing, classifying, filtering, updating, sorting, storing, networking, distributing, accessing, retrieving, transmitting, etc.), and using (monitoring, modeling, analyzing, explaining, planning, forecasting, decision making, instructing, educating, learning, etc.).

2. According to recent estimates, life on Earth will be destroyed by the increase in solar temperature only in a billion years, so we have time, if we do not mess too much with our planet.

3. The relation between the agricultural and the information revolutions may be more a matter of circular return to our origins than a linear evolution from them if, according to the information foraging theory, human users search for information online by relying on ancestral foraging mechanisms that evolved in order to find food in a pre-agricultural society (Pirolli, 2007).

4. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

5. One exabyte corresponds to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10¹⁸.

6. Source: “The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010,” white paper, sponsored by EMC–IDC, http://www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe.

7. Such daily experience normally translates into dealing with information-related ethical issues; see Floridi (2008c).

8. The definition is first introduced in Floridi (2002). The nature and scope of PI are further discussed in Floridi (2003a) and Floridi (2004). Floridi (2003b) provides an undergraduate level introduction to PI.

9. See Adams (2003) for a reconstruction of the informational turn in philosophy.

10. Source: The Economist, May 22, 2008.

11. Source: McKinsey's Information Technology Report, October 2008, “How IT can cut carbon emissions,” by Giulio Boccaletti, Markus Löffler, and Jeremy M. Oppenheim.

12. See the preface to Floridi (2008d).

13. See now Weinert (2009).

14. The reader interested in a more philosophical analysis may wish to see Floridi (2008b) and Floridi (in press).