About Knowledge in Social Network

In the lecture 3&4, we learnt about Psychology and Cognition in Online Social Networks. As we all know, people are builder and shaper of the relationships in the social networks. It will help a lot for SNA if we fully understand the basic theory of Psychology and Cognition of people and what influence people’s behaviour and thinking in the social networks.

From Hierarchy of Cognition, I know there are three levels of cognitive activities possible in problem solving: Cognition, Metacognition, and Epistemic Cognition. At the first glimpse, I thought the three terms are too abstract to understand. However, when I saw the relationship between cognition and knowledge (Figure 1.), I suddenly felt enlightened. And it reminds me of the course of Knowledge Management I once took in Undergraduate degree.

Figure 1. Hierarchy of Cognition

Data is discrete, objective fact about event. Information is the result of processing data to provide meaning. Knowledge is at the summit of data pyramid and is a justified personal belief that increases a person’s capacity to take action. Here I would like to share something about Knowledge Map with you.

No matter for an individual or an organization today, knowledge management is becoming popular and essential more than ever. Creating knowledge maps is an important part of developing a knowledge management strategy. It can represent “who knows whom”, “who knows what”, “who knows how”, and “who knows why” types of knowledge.

By looking at the LinkedIn website (www.linkedin.com), one can easily see the value and rapid growth of networks. It is a very good platform to integrate different types of knowledge. Please have a look at the screen shot of my account on LinkedIn shown in Figure 2. It shows I have 22 connections. However, through friends of friends, I was linked to more than 322,053 professionals and the network quickly grows to many people. And you could search the professionals in specific fields or some famous companies. 

Figure 2. Screen Shot of LinkedIn Website

This is the wonderful thing behind social networking: you could rapidly expand your network, enlarge your horizon, and finally you get more opportunities and support through your network.

[1] Jay Liebowitz. Social Networking: The Essence of Innovation. The Scarecro Press, 2007.