Initially, information literacy was understood in a strongly epistemic way - its goal was to know what information we need to obtain, to be able to find it, to get it (which was not always easy in the pre-Internet era), to assess it and to use it to solve a specific problem. Thus, from the beginning, it was primarily a combination of learning about a world that already exists objectively and the interviewer trying to find out something about such a world. The boundary between the subject and the object was perfect. Since the 1990s, however, the emphasis has been on what information is used for, and working with information as a creative process has come to the forefront of various models - information and information artefacts may exist objectively outside us. Still, beyond the ability to acquire and assess them, we need the skill to use them appropriately. And using it in an academic setting means writing a term paper, an essay, preparing a lecture, a presentation or a qualifying paper.

We want to move on from this historically well-grounded and understandable environment to the phenomenon known as information creativity, which is now an integral part of information literacy and probably of any learning process. Consequentialists (Siemens and Downes) argue that if we are to learn anything, we must transform information through creation into some new information artefact. They draw on the ideas of pragmatism that there is no difference between thinking and acting, but a profound unity. If we want to learn something, we must create something from the information we have. Creativity thus goes beyond mere copying (something that computers can do fundamentally better than humans), it requires that something new be created—something that contains the imprint of the creator and his experience, but also the newly acquired information. Creation is the process that generates the information needed.

The second important point for information creativity is the development of generative artificial intelligence. Whereas until relatively recently (2021), information retrieval worked by having a particular search engine (an engine) crawl existing sources and try to offer the most relevant links to them. The user then went through each result and created a new piece of work or learned something new from it. But now we get many results by generating them in a completely new way - we ask ChatGPT or Consensus a question and work further with the available results. Many things are much better and faster to find this way. In other words, new information artefacts are created in the search that was not before our prompt or question. Information retrieval becomes ontology-forming.

That's an interesting thing - the whole process of finding information works oppositely to the regular library space, where people use books and magazines with their queries to the point that they must be thrown away after a while. Here, each new query creates (usually not one, but multiple) new information sources. Of course - nothing is free. We pay with limited reliability of the results and also with significant CO₂ production. Generative AI is a non-ecological affair.

The third point to consider is the gradual dissolution of the boundaries between the creator, the searcher, and the searched space. As Latour shows, we live in an environment of networks, we are entangled in relationships with information resources of a human and non-human nature, and creativity is an essential tool to influence, change and integrate with this environment. While in 19th century Czech, the word "work" denoted suffering (and we can still find such an etymological line in Hungarian, for example), today, work is increasingly a question of self-expression, identity, and integration into society.

The technological revolution, the development of cameras in mobile phones, and graphic tablets for the price of a weekly lunch at McDonald's or literary servers have made it possible for everyone to create. Creation becomes an expression of humanity; people want to be creative. This phenomenon is creating a new information environment fundamentally different from the one that existed before the development of Web 2.0 - creativity is becoming an imperative. Creating digital objects is part of civic competence within the European Digital Competence Framework. In such a space, the notion of information creativity is crucial.

We want to highlight one more interesting aspect of information creativity: its relationship to the tools and environments in which we find ourselves and work. Lakoff argues that our thinking and categorising elements are strongly influenced by the environment in which we live (and grow up). Therefore, many people who move to a new country or experience cultural or social mobility are considered creative because they structure terms, concepts, and thinking differently than their reference group.

The key for the contemporary world is that digital technologies are causing what is referred to as 4th generation colonialism. The first colonialism is linked to the colonies that Europe built during the modern era; the second generation of colonialism was related to English culture, which became an utterly unquestioned communication standard. The third generation of colonialism was what Friedman calls the flattening of the world - the globalisation and unification of one way of working or capitalism. The fourth wave has to do with the emergence of digital tools that are identical around the world - China's Baidu looks almost similar to Google. Technology is unifying how we solve a lot of problems and how we communicate and collaborate.

Colonialism always leads to the loss of specific layers of culture and experience, to an inevitable unification, which is usually effective at first sight. Still, the effects on human culture and thinking are generally not favourable. What is lost is variety, diversity, different perspectives and structures of experience.

This is one of the key issues or moments we need to work within the relationship between technology and creativity. On the one hand, technology offers new creative possibilities, but simultaneously, it creates standardised instruments or tools that are used for creation. By producing most texts in Word and presentations in PowerPoint, there is an inevitable cultural impoverishment; we do specific activities in a certain way that the functions prescribe.

The second important aspect that we will discuss in digital wellbeing is the question of how the available technology and tools enable us to psychologically proceed creatively, whether - in the words of Heidegger - we are not living in the drag of technology or - in the words of Sollow - technology is everywhere, and productivity (or creativity) is nowhere. Setting up appropriate work practices is crucial for creativity. It is certainly not a rule that the more we use technology, the more productive we will be.

Information creativity can thus be understood as the ability to achieve one's imagination through information, as a set of skills, attitudes and knowledge that enable a person to use information interaction to create new objects or modify existing ones to transform the world gradually. At the same time, however, we need to be aware that the optimism of endless growth typical of the 1990s-10s is unsustainable; we need to look much harder for ways to work with information in a more balanced way.