The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence.

Pierre Lévy is a professor at the Department of Communication of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research. He was endowed with a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence at the University of Ottawa in 2002. His CRC in Collective Intelligence was the first academic institution worldwide to be explicitly focused on this new scientific field. He is the author of 12 books about the cultural and social impacts of digital technologies that have been translated into more than 10 languages. He has received several scientific awards in France, Italy, and Canada.