





































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 6.1 (2019) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.1 
 

 

 

 

   1 

Pierre Lévy and the Future of Internet 

Massimo Lollini 

 

Semantic Metadata, Humanist Computing and Digital Humanities, opens with an important interview 

with Pierre Lévy that reconstructs the key moments of his philosophical vision of the internet, and 

the World Wide Web, up to his most recent and highly innovative proposal of the Information 

Economy MetaLanguage (IEML). 

If we were to identify a common element to the different aspects of his thought, we could say that 

this element consists in the search for the actual living unity of human knowledge despite human 

scattering in space and time. This element was already present in his idea of collective intelligence 

theorized in 1994 book, Intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (Collective Intelligence: 

Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace); and has undergone a precise theoretical elaboration in 

World Philosophie: le marché, le cyberespace, la conscience (2000).  

The latter book offers a philosophical synthesis that goes far beyond the partial reflections that 

remain focused on discrete aspects of the so-called technological revolution advanced by the Internet 

and the WWW that scholars often analyze by paying almost exclusive attention to individual devices, 

on-line reading habits, special computing solutions or social networking practices. The result of these 

partial analyses often leads critics to condemn the technological revolution in its entirety. Pierre Lévy’s 

work is an antidote to these unilateral, quite often apocalyptic, positions and offers the theoretical 

tools to elaborate a vision of humanity critically unified in and by the space of knowledge.   

The interview reconstructs Lévy's vision from its origins in a reflection on medieval Neoplatonic 

thought, based on a top-down model, to the bottom-up model of collective intelligence that he 

considers as the engine of human development toward the unification of the planet. In his view, the 

unification of humanity also includes that of the planet through the digital representation of the 

physical world that will have beneficial effects in the search for sustainable development. 

Other topics touched on in the interview concern the relationship between the Internet and social 

media, the problem of “fake news,” and the phenomenon of so-called “post-truth,” both in the 1930s, 

when the prevailing medium was radio, and in the time of the Internet characterized by the rise of 

social media. The problem of new forms of memory needed by collective intelligence at the time of 

the Internet is also briefly touched on in the interview. 

Much space is devoted to the future of the Internet, especially in the second part of the interview 

where Lévy introduces his most recent project, the IEML. Regarding the future of the Internet Lévy 

shares the recent concerns advanced by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the WWW. Lévy points out 

that at a time when more than 60 percent of the human population is connected to the Internet, and 

http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/opinion/world-wide-web.html


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Lollini 

6.1 (2019)  2 

all information transmitted is reduced to digital data, it becomes crucial for users to be sovereign over 

their data, which are currently expropriated by the giants of Internet like Google and Facebook. 

However, the proposal to create the IEML derives from another need, that of augmenting our 

collective categorization power and developing new symbolic systems suitable for the digital medium. 

The IEML is essentially a language, a sophisticated system of semantic metadata that will allow humans 

to do much more refined conceptual research than is possible today. In short, the IEML aspires to be 

a new layer of a universal addressing system, at a time when, for the first time in human history, the 

human species is growing a universally interconnected common memory where ubiquitous data can 

be accessed and transformed by automatic symbol manipulators.  

The new universal addressing system is called Uniform Sematic Locator (USL) via semantic tags; 

it is conceived as a new layer on top of the actual interconnection between documents via the Web 

and the URLs. IEML promotes interconnection between ideas and offers a semantic space capable to 

augment collective intelligence by bringing together the humanistic disciplines and the social sciences.  

Lévy explains in detail the various aspects of his proposal including its new anthropological space, 

the “space of knowledge,” and in the Appendix to the interview he offers some very interesting 

paradigms of morphemes for the IEML. 

*** 

In the “Interventions” section our journal features an important reflection by Dino Buzzetti on 

the distinction between Humanities Computing and Digital Humanities. The essay, originally 

published in Italian, critically supports the rationales behind Humanities Computing, characterized by 

a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Buzzetti 

reconstructs accurately the history of this idea starting from the seminal works of scholars like Jean-

Claude Gardin, who underlined the need for an awareness that computation applied to the humanities 

requires both representation (data structures), and information processing (algorithms). 

Buzzetti argues that this awareness has been lost with the advent of Digital Humanities that have 

focused on the pure representation of research data, losing sight of their cognitive and algorithmic 

processing. In this perspective, the Digital Humanities, with proposals like the Textual Encoding 

Initiative (TEI), has become a document community taking care of the automation of the visualization and 

printing processes of the documents, setting aside the vision of a community dedicated instead to the 

design of archives structured data, the database community. 

While not expounding the sort of philosophical and phenomenological vision that characterizes 

Lévy's approach, Buzzetti's intervention goes well with the ideas expressed by Lévy in stressing the 

cognitive value of Humanities Computing and the new design dimension of culture within the so-

called Semantic Web. Common to the two scholars, albeit from different perspectives, is also the 

search for formal models that allow a methodological convergence between the humanities and the 

sciences, between the predominantly objective methods of the natural sciences and the prevalently 

subjective ones of literary or discursive production in general. 

Buzzetti's analysis also includes the markup used for the digital representation of the text that he 

considers simultaneously “representation” and “representation of the representation.” After all, he 

argues, the cyclic and self-referential nature of the discursive process itself leads to a theoretical 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Lollini 

6.1 (2019)  3 

perspective which, following scholars such as Varela and Merleau-Ponty, excludes the absolute 

separation between the subject and the object, between the observer and the observed. 

The recognition of the unavoidable relationship between the observer and the systems observed 

is not limited to the human sciences but extends to the field of physical and biological sciences.  For 

this reason, Buzzetti concludes, the paradigm of self-referentiality seems to open a new perspective 

of convergence between the methods of natural sciences and the methods of the human sciences 

characterized by the implementation of a computational model of the discursive processes proper to 

scientific constructions of the humanities. 

*** 

The three projects that are introduced in the third part of the journal respond differently to the 

theoretical solicitations presented in the first two sections. Following the categories of Pierre Lévy, we 

should say that, even if in a different way, all three projects are the product of a collective intelligence 

and at the same time contribute to expand the knowledge of a physical territory (in the case of 

Noisemakers! and of The Dialogues Bioregional Project) or of a literary tradition (in the case of #Laura 

speaks), making the process of their digital processing transparent.  

On the other hand, if instead we wanted to consider these projects from the point of view of the 

categories proposed by Buzzetti, we should indicate that they belong above all to the realm of the 

Digital Humanities and only partially to that of Humanist Computing. The prevailing interest of these 

projects is in fact the representation and remediation of data belonging to the physical and/or cultural 

world. Furthermore, all three are highly invested in extending the reach of the digital humanities 

beyond the borders of academia and into the public realm. 

Noisemakers! Putting the Analog in Digital Humanities by Serena Ferrando and Mark Wardecker 

describes an innovative collaborative and interdisciplinary project whose main purpose is to create 

concrete opportunities for students to participate in the “real” world and engage with the materiality 

of noise and its manifestations by interacting with the soundscape through interactive and 

multisensory practices. Noisefest! is centered around Waterville, a small Maine town, and rooted in 

the sounds and noise of its streets. It comprises a Virtual Reality tour, soundwalks and remixes, a 2D 

laser cut geographical map with Arduino controllers, and a Futuristic noise intoner. At the intersection 

of theory and experiential learning, this project help students developing the ability to portray and 

“play” the city of as a musical instrument to draw attention to the city as a multilayered sound system. 

The Dialogues Bioregional Project: Landscape Ecology in Central Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present 

by Damiano Benvegnù, outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary 

interface on Italian landscape ecology which promotes dialogues between scientists and humanists as 

well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. Shaped around the 

“Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital humanities project explores continuities and 

discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian 

territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local 

communities. Ultimately, this project will encourage communities to re-approach their natural settings 

in ecological terms. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Lollini 

6.1 (2019)  4 

#LauraSpeaks: Remediations of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte” by Elisa Briante, Marena Lear, and 

Gerardo Pisacane, is a project meant to enrich the database of the Oregon Petrarch Open Book with 

a translation and remediation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer 

Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima (1763). Each of the three authors contributes an original essay. 

Elisa Briante’s “Voicing Laura: Pellegra Bongiovanni’s challenge” illustrates Bongiovanni’s 

importance within the realm of Petrarchism, Marena Lear’s “A Living Text: Pellegra Bongiovanni’s 

Risposte and Theories of Remediation” discusses the translation of Bongiovanni’s work from Italian 

to English and the creation of the “Twitterature” version of the text. Finally, Gerardo Pisacane’s 

“Francesco, You've Got Mail - the Movie. Literary criticism through cinema” analyses the remediation 

of Bongiovanni’s Risposte into the film medium. The authors also investigate the theoretical premises 

of digital remediation and the role that hypertext plays in multiplying opportunities for meaning-

making and in enriching the act of reading and writing. 

*** 

In closing these brief introductory notes to the volume on Semantic Metadata, Humanist Computing 

and Digital Humanities, I would like to invite the authors of this issue and the other authors who over 

the years have contributed to Humanist Studies and the Digital Age to propose the topic of the next issue 

of the journal, to be published in 2021. The invitation is extended to all readers of the journal who are 

passionate about our analysis of the fate of writing and reading in the Internet age. Already in this 

issue the interview with Pierre Lèvy adds a philosophical and phenomenological dimension to this 

exciting theme

 


	Pierre Lévy and the Future of Internet
	Massimo Lollini

