Pierre Lévy (philosopher)

Pierre Lévy (Tunis, 1956) is a French media scholar, most notable for the "collective intelligence" concept he introduced in a 1994 book,^[1] Levy's theory of knowledge spaces and the cosmopedia foreshadowed the emergence of Wikipedia, anticipates wikinomics, and the efficacy of shared distributed knowledge systems.^[2]

He is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of cyberspace and digital communications. As soon as 1990 (before the web) he published a book about the merging of digital networks and hypertextual communication. He has contributed to scholarly discourses about cyberculture.^[3] In the chapter 'Interactivity' from his book Cyberculture (2001), Lévy argues that analogue communication (telephone, mail) differs from digital communication (email, chat rooms) in terms of temporal organization and material involvement of their communication systems. He claims that interactivity is a vague term that "has more to do with finding the solution to a problem, the need to develop new ways to observe, design, and evaluate methods of communication, than it does with identifying a simple, unique characteristic that can be assigned to a given system" ^[4] . Henry Jenkins, amongst others, cites him as an important influence on theories of online collective intelligence. Lévy's 1995 book, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel? (translated as Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age) develops philosopher Gilles Deleuze's conception of "the virtual" as a dimension of reality that subsists with the actual but is irreducible to it.

From 1993 to 1998 he was Professor at the University of Paris VIII, where he studied the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies. In 2004 he was recognized as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.^[5] Since 2002, he has been a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa, and a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence.^[6] His current project, the Collective Intelligence Lab, focuses on the development of an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) for the purposes of improving knowledge management.^[7]

Publications

His principal work, published in French in 1994 and translated into English, is entitled Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace ISBN 0-7382-0261-4 (Perseus, 1999).

Main publications:

• Lévy P., L’Œuvre de Warren McCulloch, in «Cahiers du CREA», 7, Paris 1986, pp. 211-255
• Id., Analyse de contenu des travaux du Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL), in «Cahiers du CREA», 8, Paris 1986, pp. 155-191.
• Id., La Machine Univers. Création, cognition et culture informatique, La Découverte, Paris 1987.
• Id., Les Technologies de l’intelligence. L’avenir de la pensée à l’ère informatique, La Découverte, Paris 1990.
• Id., L’idéographie dynamique. Vers une imagination artificielle?, La Découverte, Paris 1991.
• Id., Authier M., Les Arbres de connaissances, La Découverte, Paris 1992.
• Id., Le cosmos pense en nous, in «Chimères», XIV, 1992, poi in Id., Chambat P. (a cura di), Les Nouveaux Outils de la pensée, Éditions Descartes, Paris 1992.
• Id., De la programmation considérée comme un des beaux-arts, La Découverte, Paris 1992.
• Id., L’Intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace, La Découverte, Paris, 1994.
• Id., Qu’est-ce que le virtuel?, La Découverte, Paris 1995.
• Id., Cyberculture. Rapport au Conseil de l’Europe dans le cadre du projet “Nouvelles technologie: coopération culturelle et communication”, Odile Jacob, Paris 1997.
• Id., Labrosse D., Le Feu libérateur, Arléa, Paris 1999.
• Id., World Philosophie: le marché, le cyberespace, la conscience, Odile Jacob, Paris 2000.
• Id., Cyberdémocratie. Essai de philosophie politique, Odile Jacob, Paris 2002.
• Id., Société du savoir et développement humain, in P. Imbert (a cura di), Le Canada et la société des savoirs, CR Université d’Ottawa, Ottawa 2007, pp. 115-175.
• Id., Toward a Self-referential Collective Intelligence: Some Philosophical Background of the IEML Research Program, First International Conference, ICCCI 2009, Wroclaw (Poland) 10.2009, in N.N. Than, K. Ryszard, C. Shyi-Ming (a cura di), Computational Collective Intelligence, Semantic Web, Social Networks and Multi-agent Systems, Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg-NY 2009, pp. 22-35.
• Id., Algebraic Structure of IEML Semantic Space, CI Lab Technical Report, 2009, http://www.ieml.org/spip.php?article152.

Studies on Pierre Lévy

• Berardi F., Mutazioni e cyberpunk, Costa & Nolan, Genova 1994.
• Id., (a cura di), Cibernauti. Tecnologia, comunicazione, democrazia, Castelvecchi, Roma 1996.
• Corchia L., La teoria degli spazi antropologici di Pierre Lévy, in «The Lab’s Quarterly», 3, 2007.
• Id., La democrazia nell’era di Internet. Per una politica dell’intelligenza collettiva, Le Lettere, Firenze 2011.
• de Kerckhove D. [1995], La pelle della cultura. Un’indagine sulla nuova realtà elettronica, Costa & Nolan, Genova 1996.
• Id. [1997], L’intelligenza connettiva. L’avvento della Web society, Aurelio De Laurentiis multimedia, Milano 1999.
• Rizza G., L’intelligenza collettiva di Pierre Lévy, Zerobook, Roma 2007.
• Rodotà S., Tecnopolitica. La democrazia e le nuove tecnologie della comunicazione, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1997, 20042.

References

1. ^ L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace, Paris, La Découverte, 1994 (ISBN 2-7071-2693-4)
2. ^ Levy, Pierre (1997). Collective Intelligence. New York and London: Plenium Trade. pp. 215–220. ISBN 0306456354. ". In the fourth space, "the subject of knowledge is shaped by its encyclopedia. Because its knowledge is a knowledge of life, a living knowledge, it is what it knows. And it is precisely because of this reciprocal construction of identity and knowledge that we refer to this fourth, anthropological space as the knowledge space" (215). Within the knowledge space, "the members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore. Their collective knowledge is materialized in an immense multidimensional electronic image, perpetually metamorphosing, bustling with the rhythm of quasi-animate inventions and discoveries" (217). "Not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development" (217)." 
3. ^ Cochran, Terry (1999). "Thinking at the Edge of the Galaxy: Pierre Levy's World Projection". Boundary. 26 2 (3): 63–85. http://muse.jhu.edu.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/journals/boundary/v026/26.3cochran.html. Retrieved July 18, 2011. 
4. ^ Lévy, Pierre. "Cyberculture". Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2001, p. 228. (ISBN 0816636109)
5. ^ http://www.research.uottawa.ca/excellence-awards-recipient_35.html
6. ^ http://www.ieml.org/spip.php?article13
7. ^ http://www.ieml.org/spip.php?article9&lang=en

External links

• List of full text articles by Pierre Lévy by the eLibrary Project (eLib.at)
• Interview of Pierre Levy by Denis failly about IEML
• press release
• IEML homepage
• Pierre Levy on Twitter
• "Collective Intelligence" in Spanish, translated by the pan-american health organization
• Portuguese and French texts by Pierre Lévy
• Conferences - videos - by Pierre Lévy
• Cyberculture (2001)
• Luca Corchia, La teoria degli spazi antropologici di Pierre Lévy. Verso una filosofia politica dell’intelligenza collettiva, in «Il Trimestrale del Laboratorio. The Lab's Quarterly», Pisa, Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, 3, 2007, ss. 22.