sit down, be humble
– Kendrick Lamar
One of the lessons I was blessed to learn the hard way in my master’s program was the notion of being humble, at least as much as possible. When you have a gigantic ego and attempt to compensate for some minor deficiency by celebrating every little thing and over sharing every single accomplishment, it’s no wonder why one would become isolated from a group quite quickly.
I digress.
This past weekend, I was ecstatic to learn that I got my very first scholarly publication ever ever ever. My paper, “I Sought It, I Reddit: Examining Health Information Engagement Behaviors among Reddit Users” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Health Communication. The new section of my CV aside, I cannot help to synthesize this paper into some other readings and discourse I’ve been reading lately.
Lauren’s discussion on the impacts of social capital acquisition within organization is insightful for two reasons. First, it highlights the importance of organizational synergy and provides examples of how the synergy contributes to the environment of an organization. Second, and most importantly, it alludes to the role of social media within organizational settings.
This notion of social media’s impact is clearly something that’s becoming increasingly prevalent in academic literature, and it’s also the basis of my own research. Considering how we have become reliant on social media for many purposes, it’s no wonder that so many scholarly fields have invested academic capital into understanding more about it. For the case of this post, I’m gonna focus on how we use Wikis and social media.
My own research in particular focused on how individuals sought health information on Reddit, as well as a brief step into understanding which forms they applied to their daily lives. Social media, in this vein, has become a means for individuals to engage with crowdsourced knowledge through discourse with similarly-interested others. Compared to Wikis, which organize crowdsourced information into easily referenced bodies of knowledge (Grace, 2009), social media knowledge engagement acts as an on-demand source of knowledge sharing, searching, and creating. While Wikis have the potential for on-demand and fluid information sharing, they are as static as their creators’ abilities to maintain them and update them. Social media, on the other hand, is just as dependent on the users who interact with the platform, but differ in the sense that knowledge is fluidly exchanged and is in a constant state of flux depending on the discourse of the users.
This notion of social media’s fluid information exchange is alluded to by Hemsley and Mason (2013), but in slightly different terms. Social media acts as a network for constant communication exchange as-it-occurs with those within that network, so long as they’re connected, too. Social media also allows for the diffusion of discourse in a viral fashion, whereas Wikis are retroactive in their abilities to track information and knowledge sharing.
This dichotomy of retroactive vs. immediate knowledge sharing is the basis of a problem Yuan, Zhao, Liao, and Chi (2013) discuss in their analysis of an organization’s informational structures and knowledge sharing. That is, in order for an organization to address internal communication problems, a constant stream of information can highlight a user’s expertise as well as their personal life. This constant stream of information allows for those with questions to have a better idea of who to seek out answers from, thus continuing the stream of internal information exchange.
While my own paper focused on individual information engagement, I noted a very similar finding to the crux of this post: Social media (i.e., Reddit) allowed for not only a means of seeking knowledge, but a means of seeking out others with knowledge for a continuous stream of information sharing and knowledge management.
Clearly, social media has brought our knowledge closer together as well as more connected.
I cannot wait for others to read my work. Hopefully, others will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed working on it. Furthermore, I regret to have missed out on citing some super awesome knowledge management literature, as it would have definitely been relevant in this paper.
Coming soon to a journal near you…
Record, R. A., Silberman, W., Santiago, J., & Ham, T. (in press). I sought it, I Reddit: Examining health information engagement behaviors among Reddit users. Journal of Health Communication.
Song du jour: AMY MIYÚ & Rochelle – All Good (Original Version)
References
Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833
Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1), 138-167. doi:10.1080/10919392.2013.748614
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 the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(8), 1659-1670. doi:10.1002/asi.22863
wil. 
Congratulations on your publication, Wil!!! That’s amazing, and I’m so happy for you!
Reading this post, I was drawn to your mention of informal knowledge sharing through social media. The informality of interactions is commonplace for public social media, but in terms of organizational communication, it’s a whole new chance for a type of digital water cooler conversation. I think it has immense potential within organizations to create different sources of knowledge and expertise outside of the traditional hierarchies.
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Like http://laurenjohnson42.wordpress.com/, I will offer my congratulations as well.
My perceptions of “social media” is that it is an attempt at shortening the distance of a “tele-community of practice” (aka a ‘virtual community of practice’) but it is not any more real-time than a wiki. It is simply more frequently updated and perhaps not by the originators of the content.
I do think it is becoming an effective way to codify tacit knowledge and even better, to link people together. But I’m not wholly convinced that ‘social media’ as distinct from wikis – you started it – is any more or less social or effective.
It occurs to me as I write this that if I view the information as a stream, then social media is the ability to go forward and backward in the stream and to see what was said. A wiki is a top view presentation of the conversation/information; it’s just the latest version of it. That might pose an effective discrimination of the technologies.
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I have to agree with you Matthew, in that social medial and wikis are not more effective than the other. The problem with both is the quality control factor of the information shared. Wikis and social media can be edited and posted without much control or scrutiny as to the factual basis of the content. Wikis may have a little more control but not enough for me to distinguish between the two. I only look at wikis as an information source that is editable and I would say that also makes wikis more dangerous than social media. Social medial is obvious to anyone who is on there that the content is user created or skewed whereas wikis appear as a legit source for information.
I have experienced several institutions that do not allow wiki sources like Wikipedia just because they are editable with minimal control over the content. I would like to see (and they may exist) organizational wikis where sites are more like a shared Intranet that is monitored. This would enable the tacit and explicit knowledge to be shared with more confidence and tied to a source to that further research or explanation could be sourced.
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I agree with your statement about social media allowing for a a viral fashion of discourse and wikis being retroactive in their functionality of storing and sharing knowledge. However, I think that wikis can engage in similar viral discourse if they are configured to allow for such functionality. Indeed, wikis are most commonly configured as more of a repository than a fluid social sharing app, however this is usually a product of their base installation. For example, MediaWiki, the wiki software behind Wikipedia and most commonly used wiki software around the world installs as a “blank slate” installation. This means that the default settings allow for a very simple application which allows for the creation, storage, cataloging, and indexing of content. However, if systems administrators spend a bit of time enabling extensions, downloading add-ons, and configuring system settings, they will end up with a far more robust platform that does allow for more user discourse and tracking.
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You’re not wrong on that–wikis have the potential for fluid knowledge preservation and dissemination. However, I would argue that the harsh majority of wiki pages are static in comparison to the number of fluid social media platforms out there, which is preventing me from classifying wikis as fluid knowledge platforms. Does that make sense?
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That does, but then you’d want to dfferentiate between wikis, in general, and Wikipedia, in particular, since a sizable chunk of the latter is always in motion. Right?
Congratulations, too!!
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And that motion is simply a function of the size of the communities on the platforms. So the job would be to tease out the difference between the affordances platforms provide and how that shapes the information that flows through them, and the size of the communities on them.
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You’re not wrong, @Sean Burns. However, the Wikis I think of are all built on the same platform and act similarly to Wikipedia (and the Wikimedia parent company) and Wikis hosted on Wikia. Are there others which are less static?
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There are a lot of active fandom wikis, related to games, fiction, etc, off the top of my head. I think you’re right about the differences, but something for future study, perhaps.
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