Pierre Lévy

In 2001, he wrote the book Cyberculture. From 2002 to 2019, Lévy was a professor at the communication department of the University of Ottawa,[4] where he held a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. Lévy is fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received several awards and academic distinctions. Currently retired and works on developing the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML).[5][6][11]

Pierre Lévy studied at Grenoble Alpes University, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is literary studies, ethics and information technology. Employment is recorded with University of Paris, University of Ottawa and Université de Montréal. Works named in the authority record are Information Economy Meta Language.

• Born — 2 July 1956 • Birthplace — Tunis, Tunisia • Discipline — philosophy cultural theory media studies • Notable Works — L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace • Main Interests — collective intelligence • Education — Sorbonne University EHESS • Thesis Title — L'idée de liberté dans l'Antiquité grecque • Thesis Year — 1983 • Thesis Url — https: search.worldcat.org/title/490553413 • Doctoral Advisor — Cornelius Castoriadis[1] • Work Institutions — University of Paris VIII University of Ottawa Université de Montréal

Lévy was born in Tunisia, to a Sephardic Jewish family, before moving to France. He is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of cyberspace 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 hypertextual 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.[8] From 1993 to 1998, Lévy was Professor at the University of Paris VIII, where he studied the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies. He has contributed to many scholarly discourses about cyberculture.[9] Lévy was a member of the editorial board of the Revue virtuelle project of the Pompidou Centre 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 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 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".[10] Henry Jenkins, 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) 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.

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 addressing of digital documents.[12][13]

Pierre Lévy worked in literary studies, ethics and information technology. He was employed by University of Paris, University of Ottawa and Université de Montréal. He belonged to Royal Society of Canada and Département de littératures et de langues du monde de l'Université de Montréal.