Tacit Knowledge Exchange In Knowledge-Based Hybrid Communities

Michele Perras (Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity) [BIO]

Email: Mperras@bealinstitute.org

 

ABSTRACT:

In recent years, techno-centric cultures have witnessed the emergence of knowledge-based hybrid communities, fueled by massive increases in techno-economic development, social media, literacy, mobility, accessibility and geolocation. While responding to institutional and closed systems of knowledge, tensions and opportunities in the ways that these communities use technologies as platforms for the acquisition and exchange of tacit knowledge, ethical values, social norms and identity have developed. For these purposes, a knowledge-based hybrid community is one whose constituents possess and encourage literacy, intent and mutual support that allows increased mobility along a continuum of digital mediation with the express purpose of exchanging information, creating fluid and purposeful contexts that have the most value and potential for socially motivated innovation when the capabilities of digital and non-digital presence are bridged. Throughout this paper, I will explore and argue the significance of these communities, and their actual and potential impact on knowledge, culture and education.

Within these communities, the need to create flexible and lightweight architectures to exchange tacit knowledge emerged – to share the subjective knowledge that is articulated and exchanged through experience, expectation and interpersonal relationships as it builds the contexts for social formations and cultural narrative. In response to the difficulties of identifying, quantifying, codifying and exchanging tacit knowledge through digital platforms, certain hybrid communities, such as the international BarCamp movement and its tributaries, have to some extent designed for the emergence of Transmedia Literacy. By encouraging the critical representation and communication of meaning and intent along various points on the mediated continuum, community members are able to generate, acquire and exchange empathetic, temporally accurate, contextually relevant forms of tacit knowledge to create shared socio-cultural narratives and the mechanisms for affective change.

While these communities are using the same technologies which disrupt, displace and obsolesce the institutional and explicit systems of knowledge exchange upon which they rely, they are also creating the foundations for new and emergent systems of knowledge and literacy which are self-critical, flexible and embedded with the potential for social, technological or economic transformation.

(Sources: Benkler, Yochai. Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press 2006 or http://www.benkler.org; Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press 2006; BarCamp, http://barcamp.org)