Pierre Lévy is a leading French thinker on cyberculture. As well as writing a number of books on the intellectual dimensions of digital technology, he has been closely involved in an innovative practical attempt to apply interactive network technology to an alternative educational system (Les arbres des conniassances - "Knowledge Trees").
He currently teaches in the Hypermedia department in the University of Paris VIII. He is the author of La Machine univers, Les Technologies de l'intelligence and most recently L'Intelligence collective: pour une anthropologie du cyberspace, which are published by La Découverte in Paris, but are not yet available in translation.
Wired: You claim to be a philosopher of cyberculture. What leverage can philosophy really get out of the digital revolution apart from a few suggestive metaphors?
Lévy: It's a mistake to contrast ivory-tower philosophy with the get-it-done world of technology. A glance back at history shows that we have always used what I call "intellectual technologies" to do our thinking in the first place. After all, what are structures such as stories and rhetoric but technologies for organising our mental world?In fact I'm rather surprised that philosophers have on the whole had so little to say about the implications of digital technology. Surely what is really interesting is precisely the fact that computers are transforming our relationship with the fundamental categories of our mental life - our memory, perception and imagination. To put it more philosophically, computers have changed from the inside what it means for something to be a thinking subject.
Your latest book, on "collective intelligence", reads like a paean of praise to the democratic possibilities that fully interconnected cyberspace could open up. Why are you optimistic about the pattern of relationships between communication technologies and political systems?
First, let's be clear what we mean by "collective intelligence". For me it entails understanding how techniques of communication can unite the intellectual forces and imagination of each one of us in a greater whole.I see three types of communication that have given rise to collective intelligence in one form or another. First the non-interactive, one-to-many communication pattern of the mass media, in which people are simply fed knowledge from a small group of talking heads. Second, the telephone system, which is a genuinely interactive communication medium (many-to-many) but which cannot provide a ivisible map or memory of the collective whole that it creates. And third, the combination of communication and interaction in computerised networks, where the act of communication actually creates a continually new context of learning.
Doesn't your positive, humanist vision of Net power run the same risk as any other vision - you end up imposing a preconceived scheme on a context that by your own definition will try to escape from it?
The great fear haunting any political project is that it might secrete the hardy seeds of totalitarianism. The classic formulation of total control is George Orwell's "Big Brother is watching you". Our present era of media politics - the society of spectacle - has completely reversed these terms: slumped in front of our TV sets, we're more likely to say "we're watching you, Big Brother". In cyberspace, however, we are both watcher and watched, continually shifting roles in a moving drama, the result of which will form the collective self-knowledge of the community concerned. There is no centre from which to be or see Big Brother.In fact I suggest that we start shifting the centre of attention from "democracy", rule by the people, to what we can call "demodynamics", power by the people. Instead of thinking of democracy as a complex process by which representatives are elected to rule, we must incorporate into our communicative life the huge potential for real-time consultation and debate. It is essential that we start exploring this positive option soon; if we don't, our worst fears about misuse will inevitably translate into reality. Fast.
You have also tried to promote what you call "a dynamic ideograph system (DIS)" to enhance computer-based communication. How does this mesh in with what most of us simply call interface design?
The concept of DIS follows on directly from the vision of collective intelligence. I propose going beyond the linguistic medium of written text and exploring the possibilities opened up by the semantic dimension of software objects.A DIS would be an open-ended library of autonomous "signs" that have their own memory and can interact with others. These signs could include icons of cross-culturally meaningful objects and operations. In the same way as today's GUI icons are gradually taking on more and more functions, DIS ideograms would be both meaningful objects and logical operators, able to do something when activated - hence "dynamic". In a sense a DIS means communicating with agents. But a DIS would also exploit the dynamic qualities of animated images. Current video games already use something like crude ideographs to represent generic types of characters. And animated models are now appearing in scientific research as a way of visualising complex scenarios.
Using these as-yet-to-be-developed ideograms would be a dynamic writing technique worthy of computer communication. Be careful, though! It should not be confused in any way with multimedia - they are exact opposites. Multimedia has so far proved to be a new way of packaging pre-existing content, rather than a thorough-going intellectual technology. The DIS is an attempt to think out the qualitatively new.
Any ideas on wrapping these concepts of ideograph systems and collective intelligence back into the activity of philosophising?
The canon of philosophy, which is basically about the joys and sufferings of ideas, is an ideal candidate for a sub-domain of a DIS. The advantage of such an approach would be to offer an escape from the essentially textual tradition underlying philosophy and give precedence to the interaction of ideas. I'm devising an ideograph system for exploring new relations and potentialities among philosophical ideas, as an alternative to seeing them as texts.If Leibniz were alive today, he would almost certainly have put his ideas or theories in a relational database. There is no dominant centre or deductive foundation to the world of his ideas. They could all be linked in various interesting ways. And Hegel would have been a computer-graphics freak, showing how insides can turn into outsides through time, how lowers transform into highers, how processes can somehow transcend themselves and contrasts blend into superior unities. He would have been into morphing.
Andrew Joscelyne is a Paris-based business writer who is currently preparing a book on human language in the digital era.