Pierre Lévy (; born 1956) is a Tunisian-born
French philosopher,
cultural theorist and
media scholar
Media studies is a discipline (academia), discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media (communication), media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the ...
who specializes in the understanding of the cultural and cognitive implications of digital technologies and the phenomenon of human collective intelligence.
He introduced the
collective intelligence
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that Emergence, emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiolog ...
concept in his 1994 book ''L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace'' (''Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace''). Lévy's 1995 book, ''Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?'' (translated as ''Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age'') develops philosopher
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...
's conception of "the virtual" as a dimension of reality that subsists with the actual but is irreducible to it. In 2001, he wrote the book ''Cyberculture''.
He was a professor at the communication department of the
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa (), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a Official bilingualism in Canada, bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ot ...
, where he hold a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. Lévy is fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ...
and received several awards and academic distinctions. Pierre Lévy is currently retired and works on developing the Information Economy MetaLanguage (
IEML).
Life and work
Lévy was born in
Tunisia
Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares m ...
, to a
Sephardic Jewish
Sephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendant ...
family, before moving to
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
. He is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of
cyberspace
Cyberspace is an interconnected digital environment. It is a type of virtual world popularized with the rise of the Internet. The term entered popular culture from science fiction and the arts but is now used by technology strategists, security ...
and digital communications. Lévy has written a dozen of books that have been translated in more than 12 languages and are studied in many universities all over the world. His principal work, published in French in 1994 and translated into English, is entitled ''Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace''.
As early as 1990 Lévy published a book about the merging of digital networks and
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...
ual communication. Lévy's theory of knowledge spaces and the cosmopedia foreshadowed the emergence of Wikipedia and anticipates
wikinomics
''Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything'' is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and open-source ...
, and the efficacy of shared distributed knowledge systems.
From 1993 to 1998 Lévy was Professor at the
University of Paris VIII
Paris 8 University (), or usually the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis or Paris 8, is a public university in the Paris Metropolitan Area, Greater Paris, France. Once part of the historic University of Paris, it is now an autonomous public ...
, where he studied the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies. He has contributed to many scholarly discourses about
cyberculture
Internet culture refers to culture developed and maintained among frequent and active users of the Internet (also known as netizens) who primarily communicate with one another as members of online communities; that is, a culture whose influence ...
.
He was a member of the editorial board of the ''
Revue virtuelle'' project of the
Pompidou Centre
The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...
in Paris from 1995 to 1997 and was the author of a report on cyberculture for the Council of Europe in 1996.
In the chapter
Interactivity
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but ...
from his book ''Cyberculture'' (2001), Lévy argues that analogue communication (telephone, mail) differs from digital communication (email, chat) in terms of temporal organization and material involvement of their communication systems. He claims that
interactivity
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but ...
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".
Henry Jenkins
Henry Guy Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958) is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communicatio ...
, among others, cites him as an important influence on theories of online collective intelligence.
In ''Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age'' Lévy explores the way we virtualise every aspect of our lives, from
real time (media)
Real time within the media is a method in which events are portrayed at the same rate at which they occur in the plot. For example, if a film told in real time is two hours long, then the plot of that movie covers two hours of fictional time. If a ...
interaction through language, to our actions through technology, and our social relations through institutions. And in each case the mechanism is the same: we create some artifact, more or less material, which allows us to shift what's at stake away from the immediate here-and-now and towards a problematic where new possibilities open up.
Current project
Lévy's current project focuses on the development of an Information Economy MetaLanguage (
IEML)
for the purposes of improving knowledge management as part of his works on the design of a universal system for
semantic
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
addressing of digital documents.
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
Arléa is a French publishing house created in 1986.
Arléa publishes thirty new titles each year, including pocket ones. His catalog contains more than a thousand titles: the great classics of Antiquity (whether Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit or ...
, 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., ''The Semantic Sphere 1. Computation, Cognition and the Information Economy'', ISTE / Wiley, London and NY, 2011.
* 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.
References
Further reading
* 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., ''La pelle della cultura. Un’indagine sulla nuova realtà elettronica'', Costa & Nolan, Genova 1996.
* Id.
997
Year 997 ( CMXCVII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Japan
* 1 February: Empress Teishi gives birth to Princess Shushi - she is the first child of the emperor, but because of the power stru ...
''L’intelligenza connettiva. L’avvento della Web society'', Aurelio De Laurentiis multimedia, Milano 1999.
*
Magrassi P., ''Digitalmente confusi'', Franco Angeli, Milano 2011, pp. 171–182
* Rizza G., ''L’intelligenza collettiva di Pierre Lévy'', Zerobook, Roma 2007.
*
External links
Official blogBlog about the Information Economy Meta Language projectGrammar and dictionary of the Information Economy Meta Language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levy, Pierre
1956 births
Living people
Writers from Tunis
Canadian non-fiction writers
Academic staff of the University of Ottawa
Academic staff of Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis
French mass media scholars
Tunisian Jews
Tunisian philosophers
Jewish philosophers
Tunisian emigrants to France
20th-century French Sephardi Jews
Postmodern theory
21st-century French philosophers
French philosophers of art
20th-century French philosophers
Mass media theorists
Postmodernists
French male writers
French male non-fiction writers
French philosophers of technology