Pierre Lévy (; born 1956) is a Tunisian-born French philosopher, cultural theorist and

media scholar Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media Studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostl ...

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 sociobiology ...

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'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 (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottaw ...

, where he hold a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. Lévy is fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received several awards and academic distinctions. Pierre Lévy is currently retired and works on developing the Information Economy MetaLanguage (

IEML IEML (Information Economy Meta-Language) is an Open source artificial method to represent the semantic content of a linguistic sign. It was designed by Pierre Lévy as an Open collaboration project as part of his works on Collective intelligence ...

Life and work

Lévy was born in

Tunisia ) , image_map = Tunisia location (orthographic projection).svg , map_caption = Location of Tunisia in northern Africa , image_map2 = , capital = Tunis , largest_city = capital , ...

, to a

Sephardic Jewish Sephardic (or Sephardi) Jews (, ; lad, Djudíos Sefardíes), also ''Sepharadim'' , Modern Hebrew: ''Sfaradim'', Tiberian: Səp̄āraddîm, also , ''Ye'hude Sepharad'', lit. "The Jews of Spain", es, Judíos sefardíes (or ), pt, Judeus sefa ...

family, before moving to

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan ar ...

. He is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of

cyberspace Cyberspace is a concept describing a widespread interconnected digital technology. "The expression dates back from the first decade of the diffusion of the internet. It refers to the online world as a world 'apart', as distinct from everyday re ...

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 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 typicall ...

ual communication. Lévy's theory of knowledge spaces and the cosmopedia foreshadowed the emergence of Wikipedia and anticipates wikinomics, and the efficacy of shared distributed knowledge systems. From 1993 to 1998 Lévy was Professor at the

University of Paris VIII Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (french: Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) is a public university in Paris, France. Once part of the historic University of Paris, it is now an autonomous public institution. It is one of the th ...

, where he studied the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies. He has contributed to many scholarly discourses about

cyberculture Internet culture is a culture based on the many way people have used computer networks and their use for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. Some features of Internet culture include online communities, gaming, and social med ...

. He was a member of the editorial board of the ''

Revue virtuelle Revue virtuelle (1992–1996) was an exhibition project for early new media, virtual art technologies, computer graphics, virtual reality, hypermedia and digital art projects that was housed in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou fr ...

'' project of the

Pompidou Center The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area 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 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 Communication an ...

, 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 (

) for the purposes of improving knowledge management as part of his works on the design of a universal system for

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

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

External links

Official blog

Blog about the Information Economy Meta Language project

Grammar and dictionary of the Information Economy Meta Language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levy, Pierre 1956 births Living people Writers from Tunis Canadian non-fiction writers University of Ottawa faculty 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 Philosophers of art 20th-century French philosophers Social philosophers Mass media theorists Postmodernists French male writers Male non-fiction writers

Life and work

Current project

Main publications

References

Further reading

External links