epistemic hunger

There's something that I've been trying to figure out for a while now, and I the only term that I've been trying to wrap around it is something called 'Epistemic Hunger'.

Epistemic refers to "knowledge" and "Epistemic Hunger" is simply the hunger for knowledge. And nope, this isn't simply about curiosity or inquisitiveness.

Although unsubstantiated, I would like to believe that every person has an epistemic hunger that requires fulfillment - hence the explosion of mobile media. People want to know the things that are happening around them and in the world, and I think part of that might explain the popularity of facebook and twitter, and people log on to these services to find out what others are doing, thinking. That part, the utilisation of social media and mobile devices - that corresponds to a social epistemic hunger that we have about the people around us.

Then there is the other kind of epistemic hunger, one which is satiated by the daily consumption of information from the news outlets.I would like to think that NYTimes succeeds in this epistemic hunger rather well especially on its online resource, since NYTimes is able to connect news consumers to a wider network of information that is already out there. They have amazing graphics, and every article is linked to that wider background, not to mention the ecosystem of blogs by journalists who report back on the relevant news.

And NYTimes too, is moving towards a social model of news consumption, in getting readers to participate in rating the 'goodness' of news through user-driven recommendations. The entire setup is rather sophisticated, but it is a model that all news providers could strive towards to.

That said now, I'm turning to a more generalised view of knowledge networks, one that is driven entirely by the individual, where the user is able to develop their own Web of Knowledge in the process of satiating their own epistemic hunger.

This is going to be a long, long project...