Where are we now historically? Who are we becoming? Where are we going? These are the main questions of Floridi's book. The answer to the third question is wrapped in the answers to the other two questions. Floridi overtly answers: we are now in hyperhistory; we are becoming predominately inforgs; we are at the doorway of a no-return path towards a total onlife existence surrounded by the envelope of the infosphere. I will explain Floridi's answers and his technical terminology later. Before I do so, I have a few background comments. Floridi admittedly uses neologisms as a technique for solving what he calls in his Preface "a huge conceptual deficit" (ix) for understanding the increasing control by the technology of ICT (information and communication technology). Though not mentioned by Floridi, Neil Postman called the current development of technology, the Technopoly, and Marshal McLuhan coined the phrase "looking at the world through a rear-view mirror" to describe our failure to comprehend the current envelopment of humanity by electronic media. So, I suppose we can expect a plethora of new linguistic coinage to help us understand the rapidly changing cybersphere, and cyborgs, a linguistic coinage that Floridi finds below par. Before going further, I state what I think amounts to the covert and even repressed message of the book-of the answers to the three questions of the condition of humanity in our current and development historical situation. The repressed message is one of biophobia: life is messy, mortal, and murky; whereas, modern informatics systems are neat, on the verge of providing a form of immortality, and pure or at least clean-all unobtainable in the biosphere. Moreover, the biosphere included and especially humanity will become the silent servants of the infosphere and of ICTs. The skeptical and cynical reader may wonder whether all this new linguistic coinage does no more than cloak the real issues, cover the real message, and attempt to promote a new
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.