Collective Intelligence: some theories

This week I will present a brief overview of Pierre Levy's theories on collective intelligence.

One of the most influential theorists of Cyberculture, Pierre Lévy offers a metaphorical conceptualization and posthumanistist theorizing of cyberspace to argue for a new relationship between technology and knowledge. His view on collective intelligence allows the cultivation of a mutually developed and enhanced knowledge space through social interaction and associatiative cognitive exchanges. Lévy’s ‘information utopia’ can be nspiring for grasping the cultural ethic of open source movements and social software we have been discussing in the seminars. But as much as such approaches enlighten some elements of the cultural interfaces of the Web, they also obscure, I would like to argue, the clear relationship between the Web, digital knowledge forms and the rest of the industrial society. I will try to combine some of our reflections on the definition and classification of social software with some of my research findings from online encyclopaedias (including wikipedia).

Categories are ‘tags’

Thanks for that, Yish, I’ve been wondering how to add ‘tags’ to my own blog for ages. I’ve been using a wordpress blog for about a year and I never really understood what the categories were for. It’s good that the workshop series really is a place to learn as well as to think.

If you want to know more, there’s an interesting commentary on tags and tagging at Wired.

Thinking on Carey’s latest email and ideas about memory – I don’t know why – but somehow, whenever I get to thinking about tagging, I also start to think about memory and the idea of ‘traces’ (of knowledge, information, etc.).