مفاهیم تکاملی رسانه های اجتماعی برای مدیریت دانش سازمانی The evolutionary implications of social media for organizational knowledge management

1. Introduction Social media has been a popular and ubiquitous application of Information Technology (IT) in recent years. Facebook, while not the first social media platform, is certainly among the most dominant as of this writing. Founded in 2004, Facebook currently boasts roughly 1.8 billion users, with nearly 2/3 of those users logging in daily. The company is currently valued at over $350 billion. Of course, Facebook is not the only social media platform available. Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tencent, and Wechat each have massive user bases and strong business performance. It is difficult to define social media in a way that separates it fully from previous information and communication technologies, such as email and discussion boards (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, and Borgatti, 2014b). Many similarities exist between social media platforms and previous generations of information and communication technologies. For instance, much of the research on online communities (e.g. Butler, 2001; Preece, 2000; Wasko & Faraj, 2005) and on IT-enabled anonymity (e.g., Connolly, Jessup, & Valacich, 1990; Dennis, 1996; Sia, Tan, & Wei, 2002), applies just as readily to social media platforms as it did to email networks, chatrooms, discussion boards, and group decision support systems. Some have suggested that the “reply all” button in email is actually the first social feature in information technology, because it was the first feature that naturally enabled instant group communication (Shirky, 2008). As such, it may be more productive to recognize social media as an evolving set of IT-enabled affordances that allows people to communicate and collaborate using information technology, rather than a distinctive and independent class of technologies. Furthermore, social media platforms are increasingly leveraging a robust infrastructure of other types of technologies – such as cloud computing, mobile devices, analytics, and other emerging technologies – to deepen the communication and collaboration affordances enabled by social media. Much of the value of social media in recent years has come from the addition of new capabilities enabled by this evolving technological infrastructure.