The Nature of Knowledge in the Social Media Age: Implications for Knowledge Management Models

Social media comprise the set of tools that "enable people to connect, communicate, and collaborate," and these tools include blogs, wikis and social network sites. This paper reviews the significance of these tools and explores how together they can result in instances of virality (e.g., viral videos). Using new insights on viral processes, we provide a critical review of epistemological perspectives and the conceptual foundations underlying knowledge management models. We conclude that the widespread use of social media creates a dynamic, recursive socio-technical information and knowledge sharing system, a knowledge ecosytem (KE). This KE requires both an expansion of our understanding of knowledge creation and substantial revisions to our approaches to enterprise knowledge management.