Pierre Lévy

Philosopher, Cultural Theorist, and Media Scholar

Pierre Lévy is a Tunisian-born French philosopher, cultural theorist and media scholar 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 concept in his 1994 book Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. Lévy's 1995 book, 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. In 2001, he wrote the book Cyberculture.

He was a professor at the communication department of the University of Ottawa, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. Lévy is fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received several awards and academic distinctions. He is currently retired and works on developing the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML).

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Cover image for Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace

Date

1994

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Book

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Collective Intelligence

Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace

The number of travelers along the information superhighway is increasing at a rate of ten percent a month. How will this communications revolution affect our culture and society? Though awed by their potential, we’ve feared computers as agents of the further alienation of modern man: they take away our jobs, minimize direct human contact, even shake our faith in the unique power of the human brain. Pierre Lévy believes, however, that rather than creating a society where machines rule man, the technology of cyberspace will have a humanizing influence on us, and foster the emergence of a “collective intelligence”—a meeting of minds on the Internet—that will validate the contributions of the individual.

Mentioned in 1 document

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Francis Heylighen

The Global Brain as a New Utopia

The global brain can be conceived most fundamentally as a higher level of evolution, the way humans form a higher level of organization that evolved out of the animals. Although the analogy between an organism and a society can be applied even to primitive societies, it becomes clearly more applicable as technology develops. As transport and communication become more efficient, different parts of global society become more interdependent. At the same time, the variety of ideas, specializations, and subcultures increases. This simultaneous integration and differentiation creates an increasingly coherent system, functioning at a much higher level of complexity.

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