The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy

by Pierre Lévy

The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence.

530 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 30, 2011

About the author

Pierre Lévy (French: [levi]; born 1956 in Tunis) is a 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.

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.

Pierre Lévy currently teaches at the communication department of the University of Ottawa, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. Lévy is fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received several awards and academic distinctions.[citation needed]