Pierre Lévy

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". Henry Jenkins, among others, cites him as an important influence on theories of online collective intelligence.

He was a member of the editorial board of the Revue virtuelle project of the Pompidou Center in Paris from 1995 to 1997 and was the author of a report on cyberculture for the Council of Europe in 1996.

He introduced the collective intelligence 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.

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.

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.

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.

Pierre Lévy (French: [levi]; born 1956) 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.