We must therefore promote an ecology of communication. On the level of public policy, this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data. Regarding social and cultural aspects, this requires a strengthening of intermediary organizations, serious journalism and forums for debate, where reasoned argumentation and verification carry greater weight than immediate reaction. For families and schools, there is a growing need for new educational awareness and for formation concerning the proper and critical use of digital tools, AI and online commercial and financial platforms. In universities, the principal challenge lies in the integration of knowledge, cultivating both the capacity to connect and synthesize knowledge in order to grasp complexity, and the skills necessary to verify facts.

In my gaze it felt that despite the almost omnipresent governmental presence, human networks took a measure of their importance and along the course of confinement we saw the buildup of the lines of many solidarity networks, not only because we benevolently provided necessary goods for each-other, but also because we shared opinions, information, and a lot of imaginations along the modalities of our existing independent infrastructures, trusting each other, across borders.

Nettaviser måtte skru av kommentarfeltene. Det er et enormt informasjonsbehov, mange må gi uttrykk for fortvilelse og sinne. Men den kollektive gapestokken er nådeløs. Se for deg å bli navngitt på nettet, anklaget for å være en massedrapsmann.

‘In a complexinformation society, with a highly developed divi-sion of intellectual labor, we have no option butrely on information from sources that are usuallytrustworthy.’

‘Thedilemma, then, is that a right to information couldmake people worse off in terms of information.’’Elgesem then provides a contextual analysis of therole search engines play in the broader ‘‘informationecology’’ constituted by contemporary ICTs. Elgesemis able to connect the search engine dilemma withKant’s second formulation of the CategoricalImperative, ‘‘Act in such a way that you treathumanity, whether in your own person or in theperson of another, always at the same time as an endand never simply as a means.’’8Here, Elgeseminterprets Kant to mean that by ‘‘humanity,’’ Kantrefers to our ability to reason as the central propertythat makes us human. The simple point, as empha-sized in Kant’s famous example regarding lying, isthat failure to provide truthful information is a primeexample of violating the CI because false informationmakes it impossible for the recipient to exercise herrationality. By the same token, Elgesem argues that abiased search engine likewise makes it impossible forusers to exercise their rationality, and thus likewiserepresent violations of the CI.