pierre levy

Henry Jenkins in his “Convergence Culture - where do old and new media collide” cites Pierre Levy throughout the books, and so this afternoon I spent some time tracking him down. He is known for his studies of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies, and is “a world-leading thinker on cyberculture”, according to his wikipedia entry, with a more recent focus on semiotics - the study of signs and symbols and how meaning is constructed and understood.

Jenkins quotes from Levy’s 1997 book Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in Cyberspace) including “the distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters, will blend to form a circuit” … of expression, with each participant working to “sustain the activity of others”. Interesting that this was written ten years ago, and these concepts are now central in discussions about user creation of online content. Also “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” - so the concept of collective intelligence refers to the ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members - the knowledge community.

Significantly, he draws a distinction between shared knowledge (information held in common by the group) and collective intelligence (the sum total of information held individually by all members of the group and accessible to all). He explains… “the knowledge of a thinking community is no longer a shared knowledge for it is now impossible for a single human being to master all knowledge”.