The most commonly used name for our era is that of the `information society,`
which is a rather unexpressive and, strictly speaking, tautological term. The
informatics & society scholar Wolfgang Coy, following the example of McLuhan`s
Gutenberg Galaxy, has introduced the concept of the Turing Galaxy. The paper
retraces the pre-history of the concept, its grounding in the fundamental
breakthroughs of the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, the Turing Machine and
the Turing Test, analyses the reception of the concept in a variety of fields of
scholarship and asks for its value in the further debate on the knowledge
environment of the networked computer.
