Cyberculture

Commissioned by the Council of Europe as a report on the state of cyberspace, Cyberculture treats the network as a cultural form rather than a set of machines.

Lévy first describes the infrastructure and applications of cyberspace, then turns to what they imply for society. He takes up the art forms emerging online, the changing relation between people and knowledge, education, the preservation of culture, the growth of what he calls collective intelligence, the risk of exclusion, and the effects of the network on democracy and on city life. His argument is that the technology can widen democratic participation by drawing in more individuals and more groups. The book appeared in French from Éditions Odile Jacob in 1997; this English edition, translated by Robert Bononno, is volume 4 of the University of Minnesota Press series Electronic Mediations.

Lévy is a French theorist of digital culture. He had already published Les technologies de l'intelligence (1990), L'intelligence collective (1994, translated as Collective Intelligence in 1997) and Qu'est-ce que le virtuel? (1995), and he continued the argument afterwards in Cyberdémocratie (2002) and The Semantic Sphere (2011).