informavore
n. A person who consumes information.
Etymology
Examples
2000
Which of these activities occupies more of your time: foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We're all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.
—Rachel Chalmers, “Surf like a Bushman,” New Scientist, November 11, 2000
1999
"No central authority has cultivated the Web as a beautiful garden," said Dr. Bernardo Huberman, an Internet ecologist at Xerox PARC. "It grows on its own like an ecosystem." Informavores hunting down an interesting site link it to their own, and that site is soon linked to others, forming a vast spider web of connections.
—George Johnson, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Swarm of Insects?,” The New York Times, April 11, 1999
1984 (earliest)
Zenon Pylyshyn of the University of Western Ontario's Centre for Cognitive Science closed the conference with an apt description of homo sapiens in the information age - Man the Information Processor, or Informavore.
—Jonathan Chevreau, “Some A1 applications wishful thinking,” The Globe and Mail, March 30, 1984
Notes
This term is a blend of information and the suffix -vore (as in carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore).
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