Pierre Lévy

Who is Pierre Lévy?

Pierre Lévy 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. Lévy's 1995 book, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel? 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.