Infosphere

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The totality of all information and communication systems existing within and around human society, including digital networks, media, and data environments
2. The entire environment of information flows and communication technologies that encompasses human interaction, media, and digital infrastructures
3. A comprehensive system comprising all knowledge exchanges and related networks that support societal information dynamics and communication

Etymology: "Infosphere" is a plain modern compound, and its story is the sphere it names. The sphere part runs back to ancient Greek "sphaira", a ball or globe, which passed into Latin as "sphaera" and then through Old French into Middle English as "spere" before taking its modern spelling. Over time "sphere" came to mean a bounded realm or domain, a sense that made it easy to attach to new environments. The info part is a clipping of "information", and the pairing with "-sphere" follows the pattern of earlier coinages such as "biosphere" and "atmosphere". The result describes the whole environment in which information is created, stored, and exchanged, treated as a single domain, in the way the biosphere is treated as the living world.