Pierre Lévy is a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 media scholar, most notable for the "collective intelligence

Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks....

" concept he introduced in a 1994 book, Levy's theory of knowledge spaces and the cosmopedia foreshadowed the emergence of Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, anticipates wikinomics

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 technology, such as wikis, to be successful...

, and the efficacy of shared distributed knowledge systems.

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

Cyberculture

Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities,...

. In the chapter 'Interactivity' from his book Cyberculture (2001), Lévy argues that analogue communication (telephone

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

, mail

Mail

Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible objects: written documents, typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent through the postal system is called mail or post.In principle, a postal service...

) differs from digital communication (email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

, 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" . Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts...

, 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

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

'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

University of Paris VIII: Vincennes - Saint-Denis

The University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis is a public university in Paris. Once part of the federal University of Paris system, it is now an autonomous public institution and is part of the Academy of Créteil...

, where he studied the concept of collective intelligence

Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks....

 and knowledge-based societies. In 2004 he was recognized as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Royal Society of Canada

The Royal Society of Canada , may also operate under the more descriptive name RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada...

. Since 2002, he has been a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa

University of Ottawa

The University of Ottawa is a bilingual, research-intensive, non-denominational, international university in Ottawa, Ontario. It is one of the oldest universities in Canada. It was originally established as the College of Bytown in 1848 by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate...

, and a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. 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.

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.

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.