CONCEPT
Infolust
Ann Blair's term for the culturally driven appetite for comprehensive knowledge that predates and outlasts any particular information technology — the hunger the tools feed rather than create.
Infolust is Ann Blair's term for an information obsession — a cultural appetite for more knowledge that operates independently of the technologies that feed it. The concept reframes the standard causal story about information overload by locating the drive for comprehensive knowledge in human culture rather than in any particular tool. The printing press did not create the desire for total knowledge; the desire was already present in the encyclopedic ambitions of medieval compilers, the universalizing aspirations of classical scholarship, and the human appetite for understanding that no amount of information has ever fully satisfied. Each new information technology satisfies the existing hunger, and the satisfaction intensifies the hunger rather than sating it — because what infolust seeks is not a specific quantity of information but a feeling of comprehensive command over available knowledge that recedes with every expansion of what is available.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept directly challenges techno-determinist accounts of information overload that treat the experience as a consequence of specific tools.