This blog post extends the framework outlined in blog post 116 - originally developed for teachers and educational settings - to FIMI practitioners and the broader digital and media landscape. The central question is whether this approach remains valid in this new context, and if so, what implications it holds for the field of FIMI.
Step 1
Human autopoiesis can be understood as self-maintaining, self-realizing, and self-correcting organization mediated by generalized regulatory processes triggered by potentially destabilizing threats to, or opportunities for enhancement of, organismic viability, coherence, or adaptive functioning.
Step 2
If digital and media landscapes are understood as malleable contexts, they can be designed in ways that are perceived by citizens as threatening, opportunity-enhancing, or neither. The distinction among these categories lies not in the landscapes themselves, but in citizens’ subjective appraisal of them. Consequently, the manner in which digital and media landscapes are experienced substantially shapes citizen autopoiesis by influencing the regulatory processes through which citizens maintain, realize, and correct themselves. Citizen experience should therefore constitute a key indicator in the design, regulation, and evaluation of digital and media landscapes.
Step 3
This emphasis on citizen experience gains further significance in light of Joshua Greene’s argument that subjective experience constitutes the most universal common denominator across human beings, both within and across groups. While beliefs, identities, and values may vary substantially, all persons share the capacity for lived experience. If digital and media landscapes influence citizen autopoiesis through how they are experienced, and if experience is the most universally shared human reference point, then experience provides a uniquely generalizable and human-centered basis for evaluating digital and media landscapes. Citizen experience can therefore be treated not merely as an ancillary metric, but as a foundational indicator of digital and media landscapes’ quality.
Step 4
Given institutional co-responsibility for citizens’ well-being, design and regulation of digital and media landscapes should, all else being equal, minimize conditions that are appraised as threatening and preferentially cultivate conditions appraised as opportunity-enhancing.
Step 5
Within Saufex conditions that are appraised as threatening and as opportunity-enhancing have been identified (see: blog post 46). Under the threatening category fall: enhanced experiences of learned helplessness, polarisation and alienation, relativism, nihilism, and real or imagined threats to the citizen’s physical and psychological health. Under the opportunity enhancing category fall: enhanced experiences of participation in a process where voices are genuinely considered and acted upon, inclusion in an inclusive group, growth-oriented framed ability and adversity, and predictable and responsive communication that avoids being judgmental.
Step 6
This framework can be interpreted as a utilitarian meta-ethical stance grounded in Joshua Greene’s notion of a shared experiential “common currency.” Because experience is structurally shared across individuals as a function of human autopoietic organization, it provides a broadly generalizable basis for digital and media landscapes across diverse intra- and inter-group contexts.
Step 7
… And here the analogy breaks down since FIMI practitioners are no direct ethical agents - they themselves are mediated by the digital and media landscapes.
The most fitting next analogy can be derived from an upcoming paper (Epistemic Asymmetry in Adolescent Democratic Deliberation: Teacher Facilitation, Participatory System Design, and Initial Role Reconfiguration Insights from the SAUFEX Interdemocracy Pilot) on the role of the teacher within an Interdemocracy framework that has been prepared for the upcoming Future of Education conference (Florence, Italy – June 18-19, 2026): “Within the Saufex project, deliberations are ongoing on how to apply facilitation to curriculum subjects that lean heavily on a teacher transfer of knowledge and skills. A preliminary option could be to devise a deterministic, policy-constrained AI system, compliant to all EU and national regulations, that dynamically generates exercises and provides first-line formative assessments. Teacher facilitation would then consist of providing second-line formative assessment support, helping students interpret the feedback, clarifying procedural misunderstandings, supporting metacognition and self-correction, and ensuring accessibility and legal and ethical compliance.”
The assumption is that exposure to digital plural perspectives can function as a minimal proxy for exposure to plural perspectives in real life. The proxy supports but does not enforce autopoietic regulation.
Step 8
The shape Step 7 could take within the FIMI context is that citizens are offered an epistemic overlay over their screen-mediated digital and media landscapes that they can activate for additional context. The epistemic overlay should be optional, multi-perspective, and informative-only. It should not assign opaque or non-user-controllable algorithmic privilege to any single perspective; rather, the selection, inclusion, and ordering of sources should be transparent and, where feasible, user-configurable. Citizens should be able to choose and adjust the sources that constitute their overlay.
FIMI practitioners function as one voice within this epistemic overlay, alongside media outlets, academic contributors, and other relevant actors, contributing methodologically grounded analyses without constituting an authoritative or final interpretive layer.
Separate from the epistemic overlay, a feedback layer is to be offered that allows citizens to convey their experience of specific elements of digital and media landscapes. This layer, possibly linked to GetResilience (see: blog post 112), is structurally distinct from the overlay and serves as an input to institutional or platform-level evaluation and redesign processes, thereby preserving a separation between the shaping of experience and its aggregation and assessment.