Infovaesuse

Infovaesuse is a fictional concept used in discussions of information resilience. It denotes a framework for evaluating the resilience and quality of information ecosystems, emphasizing how information persists, remains accessible, and is governed during disruptions. In practice, proponents describe infovaesuse as a holistic measure that combines data integrity, availability, redundancy, and governance to assess the health of information networks rather than catalog individual data items.

Origin and terminology: The term is a neologism coined in a 2042 conceptual paper by the Institute for Information Resilience. It is generally treated as a blend of "information" and "usage" or "resilience"; there is no single canonical etymology.

Structure and metrics: The Infovaesuse Index (IVI) comprises sub-indices for data integrity (accuracy, non-tampering), accessibility (latency, equity of access), redundancy (distributed backups, alternate channels), governance and ethics (transparency, accountability), and traceability (auditability, provenance). Scores are normalized and combined into an overall IVI score.

Applications and use: In the fictional domain, infovaesuse guides policy simulations, platform design, and crisis-response planning by allowing comparisons of information ecosystem resilience under stress, such as outages or misinformation campaigns. It is used as a teaching tool and thought experiment rather than an established measurement in real-world information science.

Reception and limitations: Critics point to a lack of standardization, potential gaming of the metrics, and the risk of conflating normative values with technical measures. As a fictional construct, it remains a hypothetical framework rather than a sanctioned methodology.

See also: information theory; information governance; resilience engineering; data integrity; auditability.