Wikis, Social Media, and Web 2.0, Oh My!

So, we’ve looked recently at some larger themes in the research; trust, relationships, knowledge sharing, reuse, and dissemination, and ICT as a means of lessening informational distance. As Anne points out, “Wasko and Faraj argue that individual contributions in electronic networks of practice can also be explained in part social capital and individual motivations,” and so I was curious to see the role of relationship in the success or failure of all these fancy new web tools in helping us improve our KM (and, since I’m addicted to Buzzfeed quizzes, I enjoyed both Lisa and Anne’s discussions of Buzzfeed as KM, though I don’t have much to contribute on that front).

Wikis are familiar to everyone; anyone with teacher friends is familiar with the constant need to admonish students against using Wikipedia as a source. However, the positivity of Grace’s findings surprised me; my personal experience with Wikis in the corporate environment is that they have a tendency to become neglected, outdated messes unless there’s someone whose entire role is dedicated to managing them. Also, some of the advantages Grace identified (back in 2009, to be fair) seem to have been lost in the face of more apt technologies (for example, when it comes to email overload, Wikis seem to have been supplanted by the likes of Dropbox and Google Docs, which allow collaborative authorship without “publishing” the results outside of the authors until it’s ready for dissemination). The Levy article (in addition to being distractingly poor in terms of writing) felt similarly outdated. In the five years since Levy wrote, the “gravitational core” of Web 2.0 has become so deeply embedded in our relationship to the Internet that the idea of users as simply passive information consumers seems laughable. Interestingly, even the Level 0 apps mentioned in the article are now interactive Web 2.0 apps: Google Maps can hook up with the GPS on your phone, hook you up with your Google+ friends who might be nearby, and share info with your network. Her tables comparing tech and KM principles are actually quite helpful and largely still relevant, although social media doesn’t get the heavy treatment it would nowadays (since, back in 2009, MySpace was apparently still a thing).

The first conclusion that Wasko and Faraj led me to was that I needed to add Brown and Duguid to the conversation, since so much of the Wasko & Faraj work was informed by Brown & Duguid’s work.Wasko & Faraj’s summation of Brown & Duguid, stating that “knowledge flows are best understood by examining how work is actually performed and thinking about knowledge and learning as an outcome of actual engagement in practice,” struck me as a simple, yet profound insight into KM. Understanding “engagement in practice” requires us to understand the tacit knowledge, the situational and cultural mediation and negotiation, and the epistemological principles of the community of practice at hand. Understanding “how work is actually performed” requires engagement with the community of practice itself, and forces us to engage an understanding of the social capital and trust at play. It seemed, in short, to encapsulate all of the principles we’ve been trying to get at in a very complete formulation.

Like Kelly, when I got to the question that forms the heart of Wasko & Faraj’s work, I was struck by it. Why DO we spend our valuable time helping people with whom we lack relationships of trust and reciprocity? The authors rely upon Nahapiet and Ghoshal to try to formulate an answer; interestingly, though it didn’t strike me when I read Nahapiet & Ghoshal, reading their work applied struck me as deeply tinged with Skinnerian behaviorism. Interestingly, social capital seemed to play little to no role in people’s choice to share knowledge in electronic networks; I wonder, in the age of social media, if results would be different as compared to the impersonal nature of the message boards studied,

I wish I had read Brown & Duguid much earlier, especially given all the hate I heaped on poor Brown for Bridging epistemologies. While the work on non-canoical practices (as compared to official accounts) nicely exposes questions of tacit v explicit knowledge, I think it also highlights the issues of evolving knowledge (Nonaka’s spiral) and of knowledge creation and transfer in the face of non-stable environments (to be honest, the deeper I get into the literature, the more I wonder if there is or ever was a truly “stable” knowledge environment, since relationships, needs, and the world itself constantly change).

In light of the foregoing, Yuan et al.‘s results register as a big ol’ “not surprised.” Of course people use a variety of ICT’s – part of practice is finding the best tool for the job. And while Melinda seemed surprised that people prefer social media to more traditional ICT, I’m not: social media is social. Although our online personas are typically better looking and more exciting than our IRL selves, they nonetheless carry our names and core pieces of us; our social media “self” is still part of ourselves.And the relationships within social media are, at heart, social relationships – given the social nature of knowledge creation, it seems only natural that we’d prefer social media for knowledge sharing.

References:

Brown, J.S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a univfied view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science, 2(1), 40-57.

Grace, T.P.L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74.

Levy, M. (2009). Web 2.0 implications on knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Manage, 13(1), 120 – 134.

Wasko, M.M., & Faraj, S. (2005). why should I share? Examining social capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice. MIS quarterly, 29(1), 35 – 57.

Yuan, Y.C., Zhao, X., Liao, Q., & Chi, C. (2013). The use of different information and communication technologies to support knowledge sharing in organizations: From e-mail to micro-blogging. Journal of hte American Society of Information Science and Technology, 64(8), 1659-1670.