Proceedings:PA1

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This page is part of the Proceedings
of Wikimania 2006 (Index of
presentations)

Encyclopedia or Cosmopedia? Collective
Intelligence and Knowledge Technospaces

Author

Panagiota
Alevizou

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About the author

Panagiota Alevizou is a doctoral researcher at the
department of Media and Film, University of Sussex (UK). She specialises
in new media and knowledge, with a particular interest in learning
technologies, social software and forms of media literacy. Her doctoral
thesis has focused on electronic encyclopaedia and other multimodal
communication forms to explore the relationship between information
technology, knowledge and learning.

Abstract

“While the cosmopedia can be interpreted metaphorically as the
ideal figure of knowledge …, from a technical point of view, collective
intellects are effectively capable of constructing their own cosmopedia”
(Lévy, 1998: 216).

One of the most influential theorists of Cyberculture, Pierre Lévy
offered a metaphorical conceptualization of cyberspace, in terms of
encyclopaedia, to argue for a new relationship between technology and
knowledge, a relationship that allows the cultivation of a mutually
developed and enhanced knowledge space through collective intelligence and
interactive cognitive potentialities. This paper is based on Lévy’s
posthumanistist theorizing of cyberspace and hypertext to offer an
analysis of wikis, and more specifically of wikipedia. It will trace the
emergence and evolution of wikipedia in comparison with generic
conventions of and ideological assumptions on encyclopaedia, to argue for
the need to theorize the material and symbolic specificities, as well as
the social and political properties and limits of this cultural form and
medium for representing knowledge, emblematic of universally distributed
and technologically enabled intelligence. It discusses a set of issues
regarding:

the aesthetic characteristics of wikipedia;

its institutional structures within the contemporary media
landscape; and

its social, cultural and ideological significance.

The paper draws on the theoretical and the empirical temporality of the
encyclopaedia genre, its relationship with media technology and the
history of cultural formations of knowledge representation to argue for a
position that critically situates wikipedia away from the utopian
‘knowledge hive’, that preoccupies Lévy’s conceptualization of cyberspace,
and within a more egalitarian actualization of authority and authorship,
and of knowledge representation.

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