I believe it is safe to say that the variation of the material covered throughout the course of CMN 5150—Knowledge Management and Social Media or simply just UKOM is as various and diverse as the number of meanings and forms of knowledge itself. What I have taken from this course however, holds within the earliest stages of the development of the class in the basic context of the human cognition. That is the divide between human and animal; the manner in which in the context of this course are information and data processed and transformed into the level of concepts only attainable by humans and the creation and notion of abstract thinking. In personal feeling, Knowledge Management focuses much on the origins and transformation of knowledge including which the arrival of digital spaces where this can take place. To begin however, my better understanding of this took place in our discussions regarding theorists, such as Ikujiro Nonaka, who believed knowledge to be dynamic justified true belief created in social interactions among individuals (Nonaka, Toyama & Konno, 2005, p. 24) within the interactions of implicit and explicit belief (Lévy, September 11). It is the interaction between these two dimensions in which knowledge is furthered and constantly evolving (Lévy, September 11; Nonaka, Toyama & Konno, 2005, p. 26).
Upon the initial registration of this course I was captivated by the special regard paid to social media (so please forgive me since it is surrounding this topic that I took most from this course). Where I began to see this all come together was in discussion surrounding the matter of Symbolic Cognition with reference to the additional material of the Hypercortex and the Semantics Sphere (Lévy, September 11).
1Symbolic cognition consists of the social coordination of categorized phenomena, sense data and symbolic processes and the communication of symbolic memory; the reflexivity of mapping and re-mapping phenomena, self-referencing and representing and questioning, of exchanging dialogue and engaging with others and the narrativity of actors, objects and qualities and process unlimited to traditional tales (Lévy, September 27). All this in relation to symbolic ecosystems, that is not only the ideas generated from human cognition but “also the mechanisms operating their cycles of generation reproduction, networking and transformation” (Lévy, September 27) such as digital mediums—and their evolution that is “the transformation (augmentation) of the mechanisms” (Lévy, September 27)—that I finally and truly came to understand that role played by social media in the symbolic systems of human cognition.
That is that the internet and that the new social media function as sharing environment whose goal is to harness processes of creative exchange. Nonaka, Toyama & Konno (2005) argue that the knowledge creating process is neither necessarily limited to context specificity, nor to the terms of who participates, nor how they go about doing so, nor the needs for physical border constraints in order to occur (p. 31). What dawned on me during the period of this course is that the internet and new social media are the modern day interpretations of the context articulated as the ba, the space (whether physical, virtual, or mental) whereby knowledge is created, shared and used, referred to especially as the “cyber-ba” (Lévy, September 11).
The “cyber-ba” utilizes ICTs and CMTs to functions as tools of collaboration and allows for one of the most important aspects of ba and other concepts relative to knowledge as expressed in every class, that is sharing already existing ideas and converging them in collaboration with other in order to create new ones. As Nonaka, Toyama & Konno (2005) state, most knowledge is created through the interactions among or between individuals in a symbolic ecosystem (p. 31).
I was very fortunate in having chosen early on during the course two books that relate greatly to this topic. The first, the book by Tapscott and Williams (2007) Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changed everything, and the second, Clay Shirky’s (2008) Here comes everyone: The power of organizing without organizations. Tapscott and Williams (2007) argue and provide key examples how using the notion of knowledge convergence can then be applied to business and the creation of great ideas leading to organizational success. The ba in which indivisuals are capable of coming together within allow for collaboration, self-organization and peer-production the organizations can then “open their doors to the global talent pool that thrives outside their walls” (Tapscott & Williams, 2007, p 21). In addition to which, Shirky (2008), discusses the modern group dynamic through the internet and new social media and much like Tapscott & Williams (2007) states:
"[Every] institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma--because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.” (p. 21).
As a student inclined and interested in organizational communication what struck me throughout the course was the emphasis Professor Levy placed on the collaborative nature of social media in the process of creating, sharing, and generating knowledge. Where in the beginning of this course I could not seem to find the correlation between the theory and discussions of the content of Knowledge Management and the possibility of applying it within a working context, it has been made clear that it is in the sharing of knowledge that its growth is fostered and that the internet and social media now play an indicative and influential role and that it can not only be speculated, but rather acknowledge as an inevitability that it will essential become the defining factor of how we know knowledge today and in the future.
Works Cited
Lévy, P. (September 11, 2011). “Lecture Notes.” Ottawa, Ontario, the University of Ottawa.
Lévy, P. (September 27, 2011). “Lecture Notes.” Ottawa, Ontario, the University of Ottawa.
Nonaka, R.I., Toyama, R., & Konno, N. (2005). SECI, ba, and leadership: A unified model of dynamic knowledge creation. In S. Little & T. Ray (Eds), Managing knowledge: An essential reader (pp. 23-492nd ed). Thousand Oaks. CA: SAGE Publications Inc.
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everyone: The power of organizing without organizations. New York, N.Y: Penguin USA.
Tapscott, D., Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomic: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York, N.Y: Penguin Group.
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