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Encyclopedia or Cosmopedia? Collective
Intelligence and Knowledge Technospaces

Panagiota Alevizou

In his seminal book entitled Collective Intelligence, Pierre Lévy
offers an analysis of the WWW instruments, such as hypertext (1998: 155-7) to
articulate a theoretical proposal regarding the ways humans can potentially
access to, collaborate over, and indeed, produce and reproduce knowledge (1998:
215-6).

The idea of a technology, and in this case, computer technology that makes
possible a shared or collective intelligence originate, from Vanevar Bush and
Ted Nelson[1],
and it also echoes Douglas Engelbart's ideas and early designs on software that
would 'augment intellect' and enable us to think collectively [share
mental associations] rather than simply haul masses of information around us"
(1998: 27). Lévy's vision is deeply posthumanist (1998: x). It expresses an
investment on the communication possibilities of networked technology to satisfy
the desire for accelerating social production of knowledge.

Today, I will attempt to present my critical reflection on Lévy's
conceptualisation of the relationship between knowledge and technology. I will
combine this with analyses on Wikipedia. I shall concentrate on Lévy's
understanding of networked media technologies in relation to universalism and
totality, authority and hierarchy, representation and cognitive
transcendence. I critically assess much of the cosmopaedic 'knowledge hive'
that Lévy envisages by arguing for the necessity of locating such online
knowledge forms within the totality of relations that produce them.
Understanding such totality not only can defend forms such Wikipedia but also
improve their collective purposes.

Lévy's theorizing is useful because it reconnects the relationship between
technology and knowledge. And in doing so, it attempts to link the ontological
with the material dimension of technology and the interfaces that constitute
what he defines as virtuality (Lévy 1998; 2001: 19-22).

Lévy argues that the fluidity of meaning generation attached to oral
communication and live performance (what he calls somatic technologies) can be
re-enacted and also reinvented with digitization. Lévy contends, that digital
technology addresses the detail; and as a result, by enabling users to recreate
and modify messages at will, this technology becomes important for the
message[2].
In a way, this ability restores some of the performative and contextual elements
of somatic technologies, like orality. More importantly, these extensive
elements can magnify the scope of reading, materialize the senses and
re-establish sensibility with context, while preserving the media's power of
recording and reproduction (ibid: 49).

He uses the example of a hyperdocument that is sensitive to contextual
change because it has been created and restructured in real time by an
online network community. Examples can include featured the discussion part of
the featured article on posthumanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Transhumanism) and the
Wikipedia community portal.

For Lévy, it is this microcosmic treatment of information that constitutes
cyberspace. Lévy argues that virtual information is immaterial and can exist
beyond specific territories. This can produce a new form of experience in the
interaction with the texts and the generation of meaning. It can also producer
new means for organizing human groups; contrary to modes of organization
facilitated by media technologies (e.g. hierarchical, classificatory,
bureaucratic), virtuality can embrace 'human wealth attribute by attribute' to
produce large, self-organizing communities.

The cognitive perceptions of the members of a knowledge/discourse community
taken individually may be incomplete or inaccurate (see Bush 1945/2000) but
together they form a trans-active and transitive memory system that shares
domains of knowledge. This can restore the level of organicity that defines oral
communities. Virtuality is this sense can restore what has never been
modern.

This for Lévy is arguably a 'new humanism' (Provenzo 1997: viii) "that
incorporates and enlarges the scope of self-knowledge into a form of group
knowledge and collective thought" (Lévy 1998: 17)[3]:

What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed
intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time ... The basis
and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment
of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities
(ibid: 13)[4]

This type of 'knowledge exchange' works against economies of hierarchy,
authority and privilege (ibid: 18), through self-creativity and
self-advertisement (unlike control of information evident in broadcast and print
modes of communication[5]).

The development of new knowledge communities is part of the changing concept
of the 'public'; their interactions produce a new form of language and a new
textuality that constitutes cyberspace. In a sense this re-incarnates the notion
of knowledge as a 'public good' - a notion that originates from the days of St
Augustine who argued (de doctrina Christiana) that knowledge unlike physical
possessions must be freely shared.

As I mentioned earlier Lévy calls this space cosmopaedia. It encompasses
linguistic and ontological elements (Lévy, 1997b). Ideally, both its multimodal
and dialogic qualities lead to an increase of information in shared electronic
spaces. See table:

genre
structure

temporality
memory

public
private

spatiality

blogs

journal chronological narratives

Informal

Knowledge, info, personal experiences

Immediate

Visible time

Record chronologies

Blurring of personal experiences

public and migratory through rss feeds

contextual

thematic

threaded discussions

wikis

highly structured content

evolving knowledge libraries, organic

invisible time

A-temporal Collaborative, overt

Record chronologies, tagging, comparison

Public/private

Actors, concepts, instances

Community

migratory

Threads, themes, associations

social reference systems

List of shared resources & references.

Use Tags to organise info

Invisible time. Personal memory aid, collaborative tool

Rank, annotate & discuss items

Tagging & folksonomies

Indexical

Wikis recapture the original perceptions of the web as a browsing/editing
medium. In Wikipedia Unbound sections we see a clear sense of conventions
and purpose (that of a general encyclopaedia: to provide overview and that of a
reference/text book. We also see guides on authorship, editorial issues of
currency, neutrality, revision, etc and stylistic guidelines.

Let me know go back to the notion of cosmpaedia. Lévy uses the
social dispersal of meaning as a notion that emerges within and makes
possible the evolution of 'cosmopaedia'. Unlike earlier visions of global
encyclopaedias or libraries (see Wells, 1938; Bush, 1945; and also Rayward:
1997), 'cosmopaedia' is highly dialogical and transgressive of its own
boundaries. As 'universal' knowledge becomes the sharing between changing
individuals (a product of dialogue indeed, "we are the text" he argues in
Toward Super-language), there can be no totality/enclosure possible.

But Lévy's understanding of encyclopaedia, the transformation of which shapes
cosmopaedia, is both problematic and limited. This is the point that I would
like to embark my critique and continue with the limitations of both cosmopaedia
and collective intelligence.

Lévy understands encyclopaedia as a signifier of the 'circle of knowledge',
and interprets it as the 'cyclical interaction of knowledge and learning'.
According to this logic, like the circle, encyclopaedia exists only in a single
dimension: "It is a line. This figure accurately reflects a knowledge that is
mostly conveniently expressed in the form of text, for text is physically
linear..." (1998: 215). Because of this linearity and because it is bound in the
closed circle (albeit its is often seen to represent the infinite), the
encyclopaedia, is a typical form of the totality of knowledge, according to
Lévy. Although fixed by the limitations of print, the organization of knowledge
in encyclopaedias since the Enlightenment were not ordered by a circle (which
was after all the translation of 7 liberal arts), but by the alphabet or by
'tree'-like (and therefore hypertextual) hierarchies between the disciplines[6].

Late Renaissance reference works (like Margarita Philosophica) often
presented architectural structures, as though the reader were progressing
towards the inner sanctum of truth. Enlightenment encyclopaedias
(Cyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie) evolved to embrace the notion of
'knowledge trees' demonstrating how the branches of arts and the sciences grow
out of the organization of the mind. Some other ones employed geographical
metaphors, world maps or a globe. Many of the tree-like or architectural
structures were informed by assumption on moral significance (deriving from a
Christian sense of virtue like in Margarita Philosophica, which matched
the liberal arts with several stages in life). Branching taxonomies in the early
modern period abandoned moral significance for a rationale one, while world maps
also became popular metaphors for classifying. Francis Bacon promoted this by
describing an elaborate division of human learning as an 'intellectual globe' -
which also influenced classification in the Encyclopédie. Alphabetical
arrangements addressed the problem of recording new flows of knowledge without
renegotiating taxonomies in a functional way [some like Lucien Goldman saw this
as a moment of emancipation against the intellectual order imposed by the
hierarchical schemas], while others like Brockhous and Britannica
presented hybrid organizations. Wikipedia reinstated this globe metaphor, as a
planetary computing grid (see logo) or a neural net...thought the arrangements
are also thematic, alphabetical and arbitrary. What I have also found from my
critical reading of encyclopaedia's history and from my recent research into
encyclopaedias' digital evolution trajectories, is that generic conventions and
the ordering of knowledge goes side by side with not only the available media
technology, but also with the symbolic meaning and commodity status of
encyclopaedia as a self-education medium. In other words, taxonomies reflect
specific ideological assumptions and are directed by commercial or other
incentives. Wikipedia presents knowledge as collections of (verbal and visual)
ideas that can arrange themselves into a kaleidoscope of both hierarchical and
associative patterns (see structures and main portals in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). There too we see a
combination of the popular, the current, the arbitrary and the hierarchical.
Aiming to address some of the criticism over factual inaccuracies,
superficiality and lack of integrity, some of the content is starred as
'Featured Articles'. These are what the committee believes to be the best
articles in Wikipedia. They are reviewed by scientific committees of experts for
accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to featured article
criteria. Working on improving 'the quality' issue, some within the community
(contributor and mailing list administrator) push further for a scalable page
rating system, which unlike an editorial committee, will scale with the
contributor base and will highlight areas in need of attention or validation.
This somehow echoes, Lévy's ideal figure of knowledge in cyberspace: "collective
intellects" he argues, "are effectively capable of constructing their own
cosmopedia", (1998: 216), aiming in 'mutual recognition and enrichment' but also
striving to "ensure success in our highly competitive environment (ibid: 1).
Lévy aims to establish the relationship between ontology and epistemology that
was abandoned, as he claims, since E. Kant, by illustrating that "there are as
many qualities of being as there are ways of knowing" (1998: 215)[7].
A questions then rises: what are the factors motivating contributions to open
source production of goods and does this relate to the 'quality' of
contributions to such goods? Inspired from such analyses of cyberspace Jaron
Lenier (2006) articulates a general attach on distributed cooperative networked
information production and specifically on Wikipedia. He has two driving
concerns. The first is the loss of individuality, the devaluation of the unique
engaged individual responsible for a system of information and knowledge. This
is an issue that Lenier argues diminishes quality to the mediocre. The second
concern is more space bound: Lenier questions metafilters and formations of the
'hive mind' as another part of the information economy. I shall draw again on
Lévy to conflate these points and defend Wikipedia, but also raise my own
concerns (see also Blenker, 2006).

An answer to Lenier's first point, I suggest, may come from what Lévy
considers as the 'non-separation', interpretative continuum characteristic of
cosmopedia:

For collective intellects knowledge is a continuum, a large patchwork quilt
... the cosmopedia dematerializes the boundaries between different types of
knowledge. In place of the fixed organization of knowledge into discrete and
hierarchical disciplines - or the chaotic fragmentation of information and
data - there now exists an unbroken, dynamic topology... a pluralistic image
of knowledge, the cosmopedia is the mediating fabric between the collective
intellect and its world, between the collective intellect and itself. (1998:
217)

This unrestricted view of Cyberculture against economies of hierarchy and
privilege aim to promote social production as part of the struggle against the
'information superhighway' model of the Net, and for the re-democratization of
cyberspace in opposition to commercial economies, zoning and segmentation. This
can become actual through cosmopaedia that repeals homogenization to
heterogeneity.

What we see in Wikipedia is that individuals cluster around topics they care
about, diverse discourse communities that link and talk through page histories,
watch lists and topics discussions. We see a range of choices developing
different paths for conditioning what issues are relevant and salient, through
distributed systems that while imperfect, is less easily corrupted than
mainstream media. Wikipedia is not voiceless, as Lanier contends. We see
expressions of personality in the talk, discussion pages, not least in the
Wikipedia unbound pages. Wikipedians do not forget the conventions of an
encyclopaedia. Rather they attempt to use technology in order to accelerate
cognitive transcendence and social production of knowledge. We see alternative
notions of authorship in section on 'editorial control' in page histories and in
topic discussions, alongside nuances of considered opinions and structures that
formulate the normative beliefs of the wikimedia organization. Following the
employment of selection criteria, strategies are now in place to freeze articles
in order to prevent tempering and violations, while those articles that do not
meet any of the selected criteria are nominated for removal. Regular users set
up watch lists for articles they care about, so they are notified immediately
for new edits, while others chat online on ongoing issues, from article details
to general policy. Often balancing between alternative and mainstream, (between
Big Brother and eBay), wikipedians perhaps aim to appropriate collective
consciousness and mutual recognition for enrichment and cognitive
transience.

What's great about Wikipedia is the fact, as Larry Sanger argues, that it
offers a way to organise enormous amounts of labour for a single intellectual
purpose (2006, n.p). That sense of purpose I think is transparent in both
layout, and in the rich context of many articles; in this sense it cannot be
faceless; its participants develop persistent identities around definitions and
taxonomies (see Foucault, 1989). But connecting personality and personal
responsibility with the idea of authorship, in the way Lanier does is like
claiming that 'real authorship' is the royalty-bound copyrighted authorship that
is beyond the public good ethic of knowledge that Wikipedia attempts to
promote.

Having said all that we must not be oblivious of the challenges that
articulations of collective intelligence and cosmopedia hinder. In this sense I
tend to agree with Lenier that, there it is not always clear that this notion of
information and communication is anything else than the liberal counterpart of
the 'information superhighway' (see Kelly 1992; 1999; also Day 1999: 266).
Information here is reduced to being a mode of communication, and it remains
structured by formalized horizons of language and technology, which evade the
fact that indeed information networks and the Net, emerged from the political
and economic conditions that are very closely connected with the rest of
industrial society. Our collective intelligence emerge within specific media and
technological infrastructures and platforms that have specific biases. If it is
to avoid overthrowing academic and publishing elites for a new media-savvy and
literate elite, we need to interrogate Wikipedia in terms of its social and
political properties and limits.

Much of Lévy's definition of cosmopedia evades investigating in detail the
different properties of different communicative devices or constructive
spaces[8].
By assigning virtualization to a new space of textuality, Lévy fails to
interrogate technology (or the different information technologies) in terms of
their social and political properties and limits. So long communication is
viewed in terms of tokens of information by subjects who are defined in terms of
presence and representation, avoiding to investigate the social relations that
enable communication and information sharing, in their totality, then
understanding the interplay between language, knowledge and technology and
defining their ideological boundaries remains difficult.

Lévy's 'information utopia' can be inspiring for grasping the cultural ethic
of wikimedia and the blogosphere. But as much as this essentialist approach
enlightens some elements of the cultural interfaces of the Web it also obscures
the clear relationship between the Web, digital knowledge forms and the rest of
the industrial society[9].

Here we need to be reminded of two things: firstly, that cosmopedia is an
attainable utopia and not a condition completely actualized yet. And secondly
that the relationship of collective labour with the construction of knowledge as
a public good, rather as a commodity. This new modality of social production of
knowledge enabled by the combination of social software, digital media and peer
to peer collaboration offers new opportunities for encapsulating not the
universal (global) ideal of enlightenment but the emphasis to the local and the
particular relationships of posthumanism. To address constraints and challenges
appropriately me need to consider offline collectivist efforts at
dis-intermediating formerly top-down systems on education.

Endnotes

↑
In the 1940s Bush proposed a utopian model for a memory machine(memex) as part
of the anxiety for making a bewildering volume of knowledge accessible.
Nelson’s visions were encapsulated in project Xanadu, which presented the
possibility of creating and annotating personal anthologies of texts,
connected through associative linking. Both systems placed the ability to
create individual structures and personal hierarchies of knowledge.

↑
In an attempt to avert criticism of technological determinism, in
Cyberculture, Lévy sees the emergence of cyberspace as accompanying,
translating and promoting, the general evolution of civilization. More
specifically he argues that 'a technology is produce within a culture, and a
society is condition by its technologies. Conditioned, not determined.
... This an infinitely complex and partially indeterminate set of interacting
processes, which strengthen or inhibit one another' (2001: 7).

↑
We are passing thus from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the singular
idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we
think) and hence to a collective ontology (from ergo sum to ergo
sumus=we are)

↑
This notion of 'digital collective intelligence' contends to be egalitarian,
arguing for the communication of information between individuals regardless of
their social inscriptions.

↑
Far from merging individual intelligence into some indistinguishable magma,
collective intelligence is a process of growth, differentiation, and the
mutual revival of singularities (ibid: 17, emphasis added).

↑
How the structures and selectivity suggest certain ideological assumptions?

↑
Lévy contends that 'cosmopaedic knowledge brings us closer to the lived world
... our relationship to knowledge-filled representations can simulate our
aesthetic relationship to the world by integrating elements of sensibility,
imagery, even its imaginary dimension' (1998: 216).

↑
Rather than something completely new, the Net/Web has intensified, as Robins
and Webster (1999); argue, previous trends (namely capitalism) of the
industries, such as telephony, media and computers, which converged to create
the Net (see also Terranova 2000: 40-42).

↑
Rather than something completely new, the Net/Web has intensified, as Robins
and Webster (1999); argue, previous trends (namely capitalism) of the
industries, such as telephony, media and computers, which converged to create
the Net (see also Terranova 2000: 40-42). Much of Lévy’s line of thought, as
indeed the common rhetoric which dominates both cyberlibertarians (e.g. Kelly
1992; Kelly 1999) and the discourse on the information society captures the
existence of networked immaterial (collective) labour, but also neutralizes
the operations of capital (see Terranova 2000; 2004), or as Robins argues, it
'represents the attempt to reconcile political idealism with the corporate
reality principle' (1999: 20). This tradition of thought highlights more
importantly, the scale of value in a knowledge economy, the dominant state of
and assumption about knowledge in the post-industrial

References

Blenker, Y. (2006) 'Responses on Lanier, J. (2006) Digital Maoism: The
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& Co. Limited.

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