Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
Empowering Social Knowledge with Information Technology not emerge from the unfolding of a predetermined logic or a single determinant, then innovation is a disoriented. Different routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes. Significantly, these choices could have differing implications for society and for particular social groups. In the same time, Social Shaping of Technology is one of the models of the technology - society relationship. It is concerned to explore the material consequences of different technical choices, but criticizes Technological determinism, which argues that technology fol- lows its own developmental path, outside of hu- man influences, and in turn, influences society. In this way, social shaping theorists conceive the relationship between technology and society as one of mutual shaping. It defines the technoculture of entire information society - Technoculture Axis of Social Knowledge Convergence model. · is important, however, to notice that an in- ternalization of objectivations is generally more successful if communication takes place in vis-à-vis situations. Any form of mediated communication is thus inferior to face-to-face communication and in an at- tempt to synchronize associations and es- tablish a common interpretative space we can make use of these specific dynamics of social interaction. Valuation of information through the processes of s reciprocal learning, pri- oritization of relevancies, and social objectivations. Axis 3. Individual: Information Society Providing Converged Social Knowledge The process of information transformation into knowledge may be structured through three sepa- rate levels of transformation activities: · Formalization of information, visualiza- tion by means of symbols and graphs, the use of analogies and metaphors, which offer alternative, probably better known schemes of comprehension, and thorough explanation or reformulation of informa- tion in the case of several individuals fail- ing to pass this lowest level of the model. On the side of the information recipient, additional training and education can be used to help establish a common syntactic space. Contextualization of information in order to establish a common interpretative space - where past experiences are constantly re- interpreted and modified in order to fit into the currently valid system of relevancies. It · In the case of knowledge networks, we have large amounts of socially distributed knowl- edge and high degrees of specialization of the knowledge workers. Thus, assessment of social knowledge in this context is highly dependent on individual knowledge of experts, who can add importance and truthfulness to given knowledge part or information. Performance of individuals in knowledge- intensive work through network effect synergy has been documented in studies on communication, sociology and social psychology (Leavitt, 1951; Guetzkow & Simon, 1955). With the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s, the importance of contemporary information and communications technologies have become instrumental for the formation and sustenance of ties especially for individuals and groups across different geographi- cal locations. With the availability of Web 2.x and Web 3.x technologies today, the arena for social networking has changed dramatically with a great deal of social relations being conducted online. The effect of information technology use on individual work performance has also been suf- ficiently well documented in Information Systems research (Kraemer & King, 1988; Malone & Rockhart, 1991; Goodhue & Thompson, 1995). Shifting the emphasis from productivity gains through information technology use, recent stud- 260