Teaching Onlife in the Infosphere: On Being There

Essay Five--Maybe a Sixth if anyone wants to read it

As the final essay in a series of five focused on the significance for language and literacy pedagogy of Floridi’s (2008) LoA method of analysis, this essay offers a glimpse into his thinking about ultra-high levels of abstraction, what we think of as “consciousness” or “reality.” Following my representation of his presentation of an informational model of reality discussed in Floridi’s book The Fourth Revolution (2014) available here online, I will explore the literacy classroom as a bounded category of human activity within the Infosphere.

Science fiction?

Every time a student opens their digital textbook, it's displaying information and it's conducting cognitive archaeology. How long do their eyes linger on each diagram? Where do they fixate? For how long? Any return visits? Do they reread certain sentences? Where do their eyes travel when they scan an asterisk referring them to a footnote? When and where do they take breaks? The textbook is learning not just what students don't understand, but where they don't understand it.

But here's the other twist. The textbook is being read by thousands of other students whose interaction patterns are training the algorithm that shapes your students' learning experience. Your students aren't reading a textbook. They're human agents co-authoring a continuously evolving pedagogical intelligence that will teach future students. The book has become a collective mind written by every student who has ever opened it, optimized by machine learning systems operating at speeds and scales beyond human comprehension.

This isn't dystopian science fiction. This is Tuesday morning in September, 2030. In countless schools the infosphere has already dissolved the boundaries between human and machine intelligence. Reality itself is complicit with learning algorithms, and learning happens not just through conscious pedagogy but through the continuous, unconscious, algorithmic reshaping of informational reality.

Welcome to teaching in the age when the classroom teaches back.

Understanding the Infosphere: A New Reality for Educators

In the infosphere the distinction between "online" and "offline" has completely dissolved. Your smartphone, your classroom's smart board, your students' laptops, and even the sensors in your school's HVAC system are all part of one seamless informational environment. It is possible today that, at your direction, an LLM system could continuously monitor the classroom during formal instruction for assessment purposes. This is the infosphere—not a separate digital layer added to our physical world, but reality itself reconceived as an information system.

Luciano Floridi, who developed this concept, argues that we're no longer living in a world with digital technology; we're living in a fundamentally informational world. As he puts it, the infosphere "will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely 'material' world behind; rather it will be the world itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood informationally."

From History to Hyperhistory

To understand why this shift matters, Floridi suggests we think about human development in three phases. First, prehistory. Societies without the information and communication technologies (ICTs) making up literacy are unable to record and share information. Reality is in the moment of embedded sensory experience drawing upon physically limited stores of experiential knowledge.

Prehistory

In prehistoric societies, there would be vast amounts of what we might call "potential information" (my term). Weather patterns, seasonal changes, animal migration routes, plant growth cycles, astronomical movements, geological processes—this ambient information must have been cognized in patterns in long term memory and valuable in terms of evolution. Biological ambient information in the form of genetic codes, ecosystem relationships, disease patterns, nutritional content of foods, behavioral patterns of animals, etc., existed before the alphabet and perhaps were known in some manner and passed on as aspects of experience.

But information marks a category change when it becomes qualified socially, defined semantically, and transmitted in communication. In his book, Floridi makes the point that in prehistory, without systems to record events and accumulate/transmit information for future use, human societies couldn't develop the exponential learning that characterizes historical development. Knowledge and experience may have been passed on, but it was not preserved and built upon across generations.

This situation created what we might think of as a cognitive bottleneck. Individual humans and small groups can only hold so much information in memory, they can only process so many variables simultaneously, and they can only pass along limited knowledge through oral transmission. Before ICTs, human societies lived in what Floridi calls a "hand-to-mouth existence" where "lessons learnt by past generations" were lost in the cognitive bottleneck.

From an infosphere perspective, prehistoric societies existed in environments rich with potentially useful information that remained largely unused. Every footprint in mud contained forensic information, every cloud formation held meteorological data, every plant contained biochemical information. Without ICTs, this information couldn't be leveraged.

The Transition Point: Getting to Go Down in History

The shift from prehistory to history occurred when humans developed technologies to extend their information-processing capabilities beyond biological limitations. Writing systems allowed information to persist beyond individual memory. Recording technologies enabled systematic data collection. Communication technologies allowed information sharing across space and time. Floridi isn’t impressed by our ancestors just for having more information available through symbolic capture. The important point is that they developed the technological capacity and social structures to make information systematically useful rather than just occasionally observable.

Floridi identifies agriculture and manufacturing as critical aspects of life during the period of existence he calls “history” where what me might call manual information passed on from human to human without much reliance on ICTs served as the substrate of reality. Consider how much information exists in your environment right now that you can't practically use: electromagnetic signals, chemical traces, micro-vibrations, infrared patterns. This information is there, but without the right technological infrastructure to capture and process it, it remains all but prehistoric relative to your lived experience. The infosphere emerged when our technological capacity to process environmental information reached a threshold where information itself becomes the primary substrate of reality. We can finally leverage the ambient information that was always there but previously remained beyond our systematic reach.

Hyperhistory

In societies where ICTs become essential for basic functioning like most developed nations today, almost three-fourths of economic activity depends on information-based rather than physical goods. Our students are growing up in hyperhistory. For them, the idea of a world without instant access to vast databases of information is as foreign as a world without electricity was to previous generations. In the infosphere, Floridi suggests we become "inforgs"—informationally embodied organisms. Think about how daily teaching involves:

• Checking email and learning management systems

• Using digital resources and online databases

• Communicating through various platforms

• Managing student data and assessment systems

• Relying on GPS navigation, digital calendars, and streaming services

We no longer just use these technologies. We function as part of an informational network that includes human agents, artificial agents, and natural agents. Picture this: You're teaching fractions to fourth graders when suddenly the overhead lights dim slightly. Not because of an electrical problem, but because an algorithm has detected that three students in the back row are showing micro-expressions of confusion. The building's AI has cross-referenced this facial data with the lesson plan it scraped from your email, consulted research on optimal lighting for mathematical comprehension, and decided that slightly warmer, dimmer lighting will reduce cognitive load.

You didn't ask for this intervention. You don't even know it happened. But your classroom just made an autonomous decision about your teaching. This is the infosphere's most startling feature: agency distributed across systems you didn't know were agents. Your building isn't just housing your class—it's co-teaching it. The HVAC isn't just moving air—it's making pedagogical judgments. Your physical environment has become informationally intelligent in ways that operate completely beneath your conscious awareness.

The Data Deluge and Educational Implications

We live in what Floridi calls the "zettabyte age," a time when humanity generates more data in a few years than in all previous history combined. Every day, enough new data is created to fill all U.S. libraries eight times over. For educators, this creates both opportunities and challenges. Unprecedented access to information, personalized learning tools, real-time assessment data, and global educational resources is at our fingertips. Information overload, difficulty distinguishing reliable from unreliable sources, the need for new forms of digital literacy, and questions about student privacy and data security threaten to bring the enterprise crashing down.

One of the most incontestable concepts from Floridi’s work for educators to understand is that artificial systems in the infosphere exhibit "agency without intelligence." Your learning management system can take actions (sending reminders, calculating grades, organizing content) and adapt to patterns (suggesting resources based on student performance), but it doesn't understand what education means or why learning matters. This distinction is crucial because it helps us avoid both over-relying on AI systems and anthropomorphizing them. These tools are powerful agents that can assist in education, but they lack the human intelligence, qualities of understanding, intention, intuition, and emotion that remain the essential substrates of learning.

Semi-Fanciful Implications

A school's AI tutoring system consistently gives higher ratings to essays that include certain sophisticated vocabulary words, leading students to discover they can improve their scores by inserting complex terms even when they don't fit the context. The AI responds positively to an essay about "the protagonist's inexorable metamorphosis" even when the student is discussing a character who changes jobs.

What's often times startling is that the system is simultaneously very smart (it can process thousands of essays instantly and identify complex linguistic patterns) and completely unintelligent (it has no understanding of meaning, context, or educational purpose). This exemplifies Floridi's concept of "artificial agency.” Systems that can take actions and make decisions but lack consciousness, intention, or genuine understanding are agents but unintelligent.

The surprising implication is that students need to learn to collaborate with systems that are simultaneously more capable and less intelligent than traditional tools. They must develop what we might call "agency literacy.” In fact, I can already think of an assessable learning outcome fit for a syllabus: “Student will understand when, how, and why to interact with an LLM.”

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A middle school teacher notices that her online educational platform has started suggesting increasingly sophisticated math problems for one of her struggling students. She's pleased until she learns the algorithm isn't responding to the student's actual improvement, but to the fact that the student's older sibling has been logging in to help with homework. The platform treats the login credentials as representing a single "informational organism" or "inforg"—Floridi's term for how we exist in the infosphere. But the surprising twist is that this inforg is a hybrid human entity that the system cannot recognize. The algorithm is making educational decisions based on a fictional composite student who doesn't exist. This illustrates how, in the infosphere, our identities become informational constructs that may not align with our physical or psychological realities.

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A high school history teacher assigns students to research the causes of World War I. Student A spends three hours reading five carefully selected scholarly articles. Student B spends three hours skimming through dozens of websites, videos, and AI-generated summaries, accumulating far more total information. Surprisingly, Student B—despite accessing vastly more data—often demonstrates less understanding of the topic, illustrating Floridi's insight that we live in the "zettabyte age" where the problem isn't information scarcity but what he calls "small patterns" or meaningful connections hidden within vast data sets.

The counterintuitive reality is that having more information available can impede learning if students lack the skills to identify which patterns matter. Traditional reading comprehension identified the counterproductive function of “seductive details” in human text, a proclivity of the reader to move toward the interesting rather than the important and thereby lose comprehension, amplified exponentially in the zettabyte age. The concept of “seductive details” seems promising for future researchers interested in studying comprehension of artificial texts. The infosphere rewards not information consumption but information curation and synthesis—skills like resisting seduction that require fundamentally different pedagogical approaches. Information curation becomes a central concept in Floridi’s paper on Distant Writing published in April, 2025.

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A chemistry teacher uses augmented reality to show students molecular structures overlaid on their physical lab bench. During the lesson, a student reaches out to "touch" a virtual molecule and accidentally knocks over a real beaker. When asked why, the student says they forgot which objects were real and which were digital. Floridi calls this the dissolution of boundaries between online and offline reality. Students increasingly live in what he terms "onlife" wherein digital and physical experiences form a seamless whole. The surprising consequence is that traditional distinctions between "real" and "virtual" learning may become pedagogically meaningless.

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A student's conversation with an AI tutor about Shakespeare might feel more emotionally engaging than a traditional class discussion, even though one involves "fake" intelligence and the other involves real human minds. The educational challenge isn't determining which experience is more "authentic," but helping students navigate a reality where authenticity itself has been redefined. Floridi anticipates this authenticity challenge through his concept of "virtual materialism" and the "onlife experience." In "hyperhistorical" reality "the digital-online world is spilling over into the analogue-offline world and merging with it."

For Generation Z, those "born onlife," the AI tutor interaction isn't experienced as "fake" versus "real" but as different modes of meaningful engagement within a unified infosphere. Floridi notes that future generations will find artificial companions "unproblematic" while we still struggle with these distinctions. The educational challenge becomes what Floridi calls developing "maker's knowledge," familiar to teachers as not just consuming information but understanding how to "create, design, and transform information." Students need to learn the "languages through which information is created, manipulated, accessed, and consumed" rather than debating authenticity hierarchies.

Floridi suggests the real question isn't which experience is more authentic, but whether we're developing what he calls "critical acquisition" skills or the ability to navigate an environment where "the virtual may or may not work properly" and where meaning emerges through interaction rather than predetermined categories of real versus artificial.

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Despite generating more educational data than ever before, schools are simultaneously experiencing what Floridi calls "digital amnesia." A district's learning management system from five years ago contains valuable longitudinal data about student learning patterns, but the software is obsolete and the data are effectively lost. Meanwhile, current systems generate so much information that teachers suffer from data overload rather than data scarcity. The surprising reality is that in the infosphere, the challenge isn't preserving information but deciding what to forget. Schools need "information curators" as much as information collectors.

How we think about student records, institutional memory, and educational research will need to adapt. We're creating vast digital traces of student learning while simultaneously losing our capacity to learn from them systematically. Perhaps the most surprising implication is this: Your students will likely spend their careers collaborating with artificial agents that are more capable than humans in specific domains but less intelligent than humans in general cognition. They need to develop what we might call hybrid intelligence or a learned ability to leverage artificial capabilities while maintaining uniquely human qualities like moral reasoning, creative problem-solving, and emotional understanding.

Traditional educational goals like "critical thinking" or "digital literacy" have already become effectively bankrupt in terms of defensible, specific, qualified definitions used in pedagogical practice. Transitioning from history to hyperhistory in the infosphere makes hyper clear that students need to understand how to be human, i.e.,, critical thinkers, in a world increasingly populated by sophisticated but unintelligent artificial agents, a challenge that no previous generation has faced. What do we mean by critical thinking?

Moving Forward

The evidence is clear: we're already teaching and learning in the infosphere whether we acknowledge it or not. Our students navigate seamlessly between what we still think of as "digital" and "physical" experiences. As immigrants to the infosphere, we still teach as if these are separate domains. We teach what we know.

Three practical realities emerge from this analysis. First, traditional literacy instruction needs updating. Books are not obsolete, but reading now happens in environments where texts respond, adapt, and generate information from student interactions. Second, students must learn to understand how to work with artificial agents that can process information at superhuman speeds but lack basic comprehension—indeed, are decidedly not intelligent. These aren't simple tools anymore like spellcheck or even grammar checks. They're in a meaningful sense co-laborative partners that require new forms of interaction literacy.

Third, the abundance of information has shifted the educational challenge from access to curation. Students don't need more information; they need better skills for identifying meaningful patterns and relevant connections within vast datasets. The risks of seductive rabbit holes amplify in the infosphere.

The most striking insight may be that authenticity itself has been unmasked as something of a chameleon. When an AI tutor can provide more engaging Shakespeare discussions than a traditional classroom, the question isn't which is real education—both are real—it's how we prepare students for a world where meaning emerges through hybrid human-artificial interactivity.

The infosphere isn't waiting for anyone to catch up. Students are already living onlife, learning through systems that adapt and respond in real-time. The choice to engage or not with this reality is illusory. All we have to decide is how thoughtfully we'll engage it, and for some of us, including me, the learning curve is steep. The transition is happening with or without us.

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