Caseorganic: Created page with "===Biography=== Pierre Lévy (b. 2 July 1956, Tunis) is a French philosopher and media theorist, one of the principal European thinkers of networked culture. He studied history of science with Michel Serres and sociology of information with Cornelius Castoriadis. He taught at the University of Paris VIII from 1993 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2019 was professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Collect..."

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Created page with "===Biography=== Pierre Lévy (b. 2 July 1956, Tunis) is a French philosopher and media theorist, one of the principal European thinkers of networked culture. He studied history of science with Michel Serres and sociology of information with Cornelius Castoriadis. He taught at the University of Paris VIII from 1993 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2019 was professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Collect..."

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===Biography===
Pierre Lévy (b. 2 July 1956, Tunis) is a French philosopher and media theorist, one of the principal European thinkers of networked culture. He studied history of science with Michel Serres and sociology of information with Cornelius Castoriadis. He taught at the University of Paris VIII from 1993 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2019 was professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_L%C3%A9vy Pierre Lévy], biography and bibliography.</ref>

===Key Ideas===
* '''Collective intelligence.''' Lévy's central concept, introduced in ''L'intelligence collective'' (1994). He defines it as "a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills." Its ethical premise is that nobody knows everything and everybody knows something, so the task is not to select experts but to build the coordination that lets distributed knowledge be found and used. Written years before Wikipedia, the book describes something very like it, and Lévy's framing was later taken up widely in media studies — notably by Henry Jenkins in work on fan communities and convergence culture.
* '''The virtual.''' In ''Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?'' (1995), Lévy rejects the ordinary opposition of virtual and real. Following Deleuze and, behind him, Bergson, he treats the virtual as a mode of the real: the actual is one resolution of a virtual problem, and virtualisation is the movement that turns a given solution back into a question. A conversation, a text and a body can all be virtualised. This is a considerably more precise use of "virtual" than most writing on virtual reality manages.
* '''Cyberculture.''' His 1997 report for the Council of Europe, published in English as ''Cyberculture'' (2001), treats the growth of the network as a cultural rather than technical event, organised around interactivity, universality without totality, and the deterritorialisation of the message.
* '''IEML (Information Economy MetaLanguage).''' Lévy's long-running project since the mid-2000s: an artificial language with a regular algebraic structure designed to make the semantics of digital documents computable, so that collective intelligence can be reflexively modelled rather than merely aggregated.

===Selected Works===
* ''Les technologies de l'intelligence'' (1990)
* ''L'idéographie dynamique'' (1991)
* ''L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace'' (1994); English: ''Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace'' (1997)
* ''Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?'' (1995); English: ''Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age'' (1998)
* ''Cyberculture'' (1997; English 2001)
* ''The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy'' (2011)

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Lévy provides the most carefully worked-out European account of distributed cognition as a cultural condition rather than a cognitive-science finding. His refusal to treat the virtual as unreal, and his insistence that intelligence is a property of collectives and their instruments rather than of individual skulls, are directly load-bearing for any anthropology that takes technology as constitutive of thought rather than as an aid to it.

===Related Reading===
* [[Collective Intelligence]]
* [[Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory]]
* [[Meme]]
* [[Polyphrenia]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Critical Theory]]
[[Category:Cyberspace]]
[[Category:Information Society]]

Pierre Levy - Revision history