Collective Intelligence [Hardcover]

Pierre Levy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 1997

The number of travelers along the information superhighway is increasing at a rate of ten percent a month. How will this communications revolution affect our culture and society? Pierre Levy believes that rather than creating a society where machines rule man, the technology of cyberspace will have a humanizing influence on us, and foster the emergence of a "collective intelligence"—a meeting of minds on the Internet—that will validate the contributions of the individual.With a depth of scholarship and imaginative insight rare among media critics, Levy demonstrates how the unfettered exchange of ideas in cyberspace has the potential to liberate us from the social and political hierarchies that have stood in the way of mankind's advancement. At once a profound historical analysis of the development of human culture and a blueprint for the future, Collective Intelligence is a visionary work that will make a substantial contribution to our views on society through to the next millennium.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pierre Levy sees us as moving past an information economy into an economy based on human interactions; a social economy. While the idea may seem startling, given our current emphasis on all things monetary, his reasoning makes you stop and give careful thought to ideas you may not have considered before. As technology advances, Levy points out, it's capable of taking on more and more advanced tasks--first simple labor and now the processing of information. As these capabilities become easier and well within everyone's reach, their value declines.

But the one thing that is beyond the reach of pure technology is the construction and maintenance of social interactions. What technology can do, however, is make it easier for humans to interact over greater distances and around obstacles. "Our humanity," Levy writes, "is the most precious thing we have." Levy, who is a professor in the department of hypermedia at the University of Paris, then predicts that we will take greater control of that value and everything related to it as we use technology to organize ourselves into what he calls Living Cities. Here, physical location is less important than the interactions of its members, and not surprisingly, the lack of territorialities will challenge present methods of governance.

Levy insists we are in the early moments of an historical paradigm shift of the magnitude of the Renaissance. And yet he avoids wild utopianism, keeping a clear eye on the realities and challenges inherent in any great transformation, complete with ample opportunities for things to go wrong. What emerges, however, is a different way of viewing the possible future, and plenty of reasons for asking why this utopian vision isn't attainable.

Review

Lévy's book is important because it advocates an alternative future for the Net. As a French intellectual, he doesn't accept free market dogmas. This approach is not simply morally preferable. It is also a precondition for any coherent analysis of what's really happening in the Net. -- New Scientist, Richard Barbrook

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 277 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (August 21, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306456354
• ISBN-13: 978-0306456350
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,168,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Profound, and enormous range October 16, 2001

By Nick Drengenberg

Format:Paperback

Sometimes Pierre Levy likes Michel Serres a little too much. Serres, a brilliantly original thinker, often explains that what he says and how he says it are inseparable, and is thereby in the best French philosophical tradition. Which works very well in his books, for the initiated, but Levy's probable attempt to emulate this in Collective Intelligence doesn't quite reach par, although at no point is he difficult to understand - the prose is just occasionally over-baked.

This being the only reason the rating dropped from five to four stars, on to what makes this an essential read. The title is a little unfortunate, as it will have some buyers believing here is another new-age bible about networked togetherness and pony-tailed social savvy. It isn't. Like Becoming Virtual, this is a serious book of philosophy, sociology and anthropology, with concepts and insights that make other theorising in the area of information technology, for example, look positively anemic by comparison. Above all 'collective' has wider meanings than the normal usage, and explaining how is probably the best way to review the book.

'Collective' usually implies a collection, a group of distinct things gathered together in some way to make a bigger thing. Some reviewers of the book use this meaning, suggesting Levy's idea is that technologies such as the internet simply extend traditional communication processes over large geographical distances, so that we can 'share information' better, and so on. Levy's collective, on the other hand, derives from Serres', where all large-scale, collective phenomena are distributive rather than summative - you don't make big, 'global' things by stacking lots of smaller, 'local' things, Lego-block style, because the local and the global don't have any necessary relationship.... In fact they're separate things - this idea takes a LOT of getting used to, but once you're there you understand why Levy's concept of collective intelligence is so powerful.

Take for instance a government, with a representative parliament. Common sense, at least since Hobbes, says this government derives its validity and power from the fact that it is merely the aggregate body of citizens, who are its Lego blocks, if you will. The government is this mass of citizens added up, and represented by a few who sit at its head. Not so for Levy - each person, including government ministers, remains resolutely 'local', and a government is as local as where it happens to sit. What gives it wider or global efficacy is simply the fact that this particular local institution has managed to embody or even create certain interests which are common to the multitude of people it represents - they grant it power or allegiance because of this, but everything stays local. Decisions made by this government then give the appearance of controlling society simply because every local interest these decisions move through allows them passage, or enacts them (and when this changes to refusal, we see 'government' itself, many times in history, come under threat). This is what Levy means by collective or distributed action, where large-scale and small-scale phenomena have no ontological difference, merely a difference in emphasis. You don't find the global only at the central point (here, government), but at each and every local point in the society - the government is simply that place which has drastically simplified these millions of local actions into a (relative) few formulae which all can agree on, in one local place - parliament. It's not imposing its will, but is the distillation of these millions of local wills.

So what is collective intelligence? To quote Levy, "It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills...No one knows everything, everyone knows something...". Intelligence for Levy is a combination of skills, understanding and knowledge. Skills are what we develop when we interact with physical things; our relations with signs and information give us knowledge; our interaction with others gives us understanding. All three apply to the same object simultaneously - we 'know' about genes, for example, by studying them in their instrumental physicality (skills), in conjunction with our colleagues (understanding), while manipulating our papers and concepts about them (knowledge). Levy adds his notion of collectives to this schema to show how, with the help of new information technologies in particular, each skill, piece of knowledge and understanding is now distributed, rather than isolated in some one place. The Greenhouse Effect isn't your ordinary, isolable lab object, because AS an object it is the co-creation of many different types of scientist, as well as politician, environmentalist, farmer and so on. It is a collective object, and we have to learn to be collectively intelligent about it. Similarly marketing has long since abandoned the attempt to correctly predict what 'people will like' and has incorporated them collectively in the entire production process, so products are becoming more a co-creation of consumer and producer - they are collective products. As in the political example previously, nobody can centralise knowledge any more than power, it is global in each place, and the objects we now produce only exist or survive if they can be animated by each locality, and represented and 'controlled' by another locality which is intelligently sensitive to these localities.

The range of this book must escape the scope of any 1000-word review. Levy does some fascinating anthropological work here as well, tracing the emergence of collective intelligence through different types of societies. And lots more. Read it. Read more ›

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Theology as the Origin and Goal of the Internet October 25, 2000

By Tom Gray

Format:Paperback

If you want an interesting book, I'd recommend 'Collective Intelligence' by Pierre Levy. This book examines the social impact of Internet technology and proposes a set of ideals that should be used to guide a society using it. Levy tries to show how his set of ideals would obtain the most benefits from society from this technology. An interesting part of the book occurs when Levy compares the mode of live in an Internet society with that derived from Catholic ideals. He recounts mediaeval Catholic philosophy on the means by which God's insight creates the world. God exists by hid contemplation his own existence since he is the essence of all things and out of this contemplation springs angels which can contemplate their own existence but need other things to exist. There are 10 ranks of angels each created either by God's or the next higher angel rank's contemplation of themselves. The contemplation of the lowest rank of angels creates our world.

The nub of this is that the world is top down. The ideal is at the pyramid of existence and goodness derives its meaning from the top. Levy contrasts this with the new conception of the Internet. The lowest rank which is our world can create a new world above it. In our case, it is the lowest level of connectivity of the Internet. This new world is good in so far as it enables the inhabitants of our world to flourish. The lowest levels in cyberspace can create higher levels of existence with no limits on the number of levels which corresponds to the ranks of angels. Goodness flows up these levels from the real world in direct contrast to Catholic theology. Another view on this can be found in, 'The Religion of Technology' by David F. Noble. This book traces the origin of the Internet and the attitudes of its developers to Protestant theology.... Instead of goodness entering the world through God's omnipotence, Protestants believe that they are required to build God's kingdom in this world. The drive in northern Europe for technological enhancements to life derives from this.

These two books support each other. Levy offers this Internet world as an ideal and contrasts it with the Catholic ideal. Noble examines it as an historical process and notes its derivation from Protestantism.

These are two very interesting books. Read more ›

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Personal, Social, and Knowledge Space April 7, 2000

By Robert David STEELE Vivas HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

This dude is a heavy hitter, and it says a lot that this one made it over the water from the French original. Clearly a modern day successor to Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society) and before him Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Levy begins with the premise that the prosperity of any nation or other entity depends on their ability to navigate the knowledge space, and the corollary proposition that the knowledge space will displace the spaces of the (natural) earth, (political) territory, or (economic) commodity. He is acutely conscious of the evil of power, and hopes that collective intelligence will negate such power. He ends with a warning regarding our construction of the ultimate labyrinth, cyberspace, where we must refine the architecture in support of freedom, or lose control of cyberspace to power and the evil that power brings with it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Inspiring Vision April 28, 2009

By Dan Wallace

Format:Paperback

Collective Intelligence was published in 1997, just as the Internet was gaining traction in the popular imagination. Reading this book, together with Neuromancer, made me realize that something monumental was afoot. Pierre Levy inspired me with this kind, poetic and visionary book.

With cyberspace Levy says, " Movement no longer means moving point to point on the globe, but crossing universes of problems, lived worlds, landscapes of meaning." Later he says, "The prosperity of a nation, geographical region, business, or individual depends on their ability to navigate the knowledge space. Building the knowledge space will mean acquiring the institutional, technical, and conceptual instruments needed to make information navigable, so that each of us is able to orient ourselves and recognize others on the basis of mutual interested, abilities, projects, means, and the identities within this new space." This process has made great strides since 1997, but I have heard it said that we are still on page one of the history of the Internet.

Levy explains how totalitarianism fails because it cannot not harness collective intelligence. But he cites the mass media focus on spectacle as a hindrance to capitalist society, and believes that cyberspace would help people filter their information and navigate knowledge. He said, "In the society of the spectacle, thought is buried in the world of media and advertising." As a solution, he sees reciprocal apprenticeship, breaking down previous social hierarchies. To help bind us together, Levy also sees the importance of signs, symbols and stories in cyberspace.

A deep and generous philosophy pervades this book. He says, "The just man includes, he integrates, he repairs the social fabric...." And Levy says the just do not seek power, but the strength to know, think, imagine and do. He further states, " The good is opposed to evil; it is exclusionary. The best, however, includes evil since, logically equivalent to the lesser evil, it is satisfied with minimizing it."

Levy's big idea is a society guided by collective intelligence, direct democracy, and distributed power. He writes, "Cyberspace could become the most perfectly integrated medium within a community for problem analysis, group discussion, the development of an awareness of complex processes, collective decision-making, and evaluation." Levy makes no claim to how soon this could happen, and he recognizes the difficulties, but this book offers a vision. You can see it starting to happen through Wikipedia, blogs, social media, and boundaryless corporations. I hope his vision comes true. This is a wonderful book.

Neuromancer Read more ›