Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace

Rating:
Summary: woooo frightening
Review: I haven't read this book but it scares me anyway will this do

Rating:
Summary: Theology as the Origin and Goal of the Internet
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Theology as the Origin and Goal of the Internet
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: the review of Collective Intelligence
Review: In the book, Collective Intelligence, by Pierre Levy, is shows that mankind is emerging into a world of computer life. The book was rather dry in some points and other then that it was well written. The writer gave a good and strong introduction to collective intelligence. First Levy tells about the ethics of collective intelligence and whether it is a necessary thing. Next he discusses the economy of collective intelligence and how with the growth of technology it is forcing people to abandon their homes, cultures, languages, and even destroying the conventional ideas of a community. He goes on to talk about the technology of collective intelligence and how it is altering life, matter, information, and human communities.

Levy explores the emergence of cyberspace as it effects us in a world of reality and the real world. Levy goes on to discuss a world where man is not ruled by machines. Levy talks about how cyberspace influences people and how it will change and alter people's lives. Levy tells about how with the Internet grows and emerges in people's lives the concept of the individual's idea will change into the concept of a group of minds that will connect over the Internet and come up with new ideas instead of the individual's.

Rating:
Summary: Profound, and enormous range
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Personal, Social, and Knowledge Space
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Personal, Social, and Knowledge Space
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Naive utopian view of cyberspace
Review: Two things I really didn't like about this book: (1) The agonizingly painful (to read) language of post-modernist thinkers. Terms like "deterritorialization" and "rhizomatic processes" infest the text to the point where you feel like you're reading some strange dialect of the English language. It's maddening. (2) The author presents a charming but hopelessly naive utopian view of an emerging social world, centered around the sharing of knowledge within cyberspace, that will usher in a marvelous new era of individually-centered democracy and freedom - the notion of "collective intelligence." One wonders if Levy has actually spent any time at all communing with the people who populate the chatrooms and message boards of cyberspace - "collective intelligence" indeed, more like "collective prejudice and stupidity." It is completely beyond me how others have found this book to be of any value whatsoever.

Rating:
Summary: Naive utopian view of cyberspace
Review: Two things I really didn't like about this book: (1) The agonizingly painful (to read) language of post-modernist thinkers. Terms like "deterritorialization" and "rhizomatic processes" infest the text to the point where you feel like you're reading some strange dialect of the English language. It's maddening. (2) The author presents a charming but hopelessly naive utopian view of an emerging social world, centered around the sharing of knowledge within cyberspace, that will usher in a marvelous new era of individually-centered democracy and freedom - the notion of "collective intelligence." One wonders if Levy has actually spent any time at all communing with the people who populate the chatrooms and message boards of cyberspace - "collective intelligence" indeed, more like "collective prejudice and stupidity." It is completely beyond me how others have found this book to be of any value whatsoever.