There’s a word for what I am now

Actually it’s been around for quite some time, but I don’t usually buzz around the kinds of flowers online and in print-media that the word most commonly crops up.

Infovore – a consumer of information.

My first encounter with it was today while over at Lost Garden reading danc’s thoughts on an article he read online over at New Scientist, discussing the idea that ‘games are designer-food for infovores’, as the link well shows in its html title.

I like infovore and the principles that are behind it. The brief discussion of danc’s reveals a whole lot of physiological reasons as to why I seek information the way I do. By the way, don’t bother going to the link in his post to New Scientist unless you’re a subscriber or willing to pay for it. Danc has extracted a lot of good quotes from it anyway, and they’re all quite interesting. Following his post of-course are the inevitable comments by his regular readers and fellow industry colleagues which as usual include some good insights.

In their discussions, they toss around an idea briefly as to why, if the physiological process of learning is so enjoyable, do most people hate it so much? What stops us from being dynamic? What inhibits this almost euphoric chemical response we have when something clicks in our brains?

To be honest, I actually can’t offer perspective in this area, because I haven’t stopped – I’ve always loved learning, and I continue to seek information about anything and everything, all the time, almost constantly. When I’m not actively seeking raw information in the form of text or visual documentation, I’m constantly observing the life around me, turning things over in my mind and seeing what I can learn from them. This activity is engaged in any number of contexts, from considering people I’m in direct contact with and their behaviour, to examining people in a corporate or global sense – by the way for those not familiar with the terminology, this doesn’t relate to the workplace and the planet earth. When we discuss sociological interaction on a corporate or global level, we mean many people in a social system. Of-course the context works for workplaces and the world, but most of the time it simply means any larger number of people, generally with whom we are not intimately tied as an individual.

My infovorous diet isn’t all sociology though.
In a single day it can range from technology – new and old, spirituality, self-examination, natural systems and ecology, history – pretty much anything my mind can get a hold of. I thirst for new information, and the more information I consume, the more I find my perspective grows.

Here perhaps is where the core of the subject is for me; perspective.
I don’t only love the nature of the information itself, nor the feeling of comprehension, the ‘click’ that’s mentioned in the article. What I enjoy is how all these pieces of information all integrate with my life on an intimate level. My understanding of something technical truly does have an effect on how I consider spiritual things. The things I learn about agriculture and ecology to give me perspective on my own behaviour on a daily basis. It isn’t as easy as saying ‘machine-code is complicated, people are complicated’, the relationships are more intricate than that, but the more knowledge I acquire, the more each separate idea becomes joined to its neighbours. These things are the constructions of life, the underlying principals that make it work, and the results of it happening. The more of it I can see, the more things I’m in turn able to see, and my perspective grows.

Life truly is infinite, and each individual aspect of it is inspiring enough on its own, but when they begin to join together to form something larger, the true scale of life becomes something almost incomprehendable – something so enourmous that we can hardly see it for its size…

except we can, slowly, piece by piece in small things, in new ideas.

In knowledge.