
The Contradictory Influence of Social Media Affordances on Online Communal Knowledge Sharing
Author(s) -
Majchrzak Ann,
Faraj Samer,
Kane Gerald C.,
Azad Bijan
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of computer‐mediated communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.15
H-Index - 119
ISSN - 1083-6101
DOI - 10.1111/jcc4.12030
Subject(s) - affordance , conversation , social media , knowledge sharing , affect (linguistics) , knowledge management , generative grammar , process (computing) , psychology , sociology , social psychology , computer science , communication , cognitive psychology , world wide web , artificial intelligence , operating system
The use of social media creates the opportunity to turn organization‐wide knowledge sharing in the workplace from an intermittent, centralized knowledge management process to a continuous online knowledge conversation of strangers, unexpected interpretations and re‐uses, and dynamic emergence. We theorize four affordances of social media representing different ways to engage in this publicly visible knowledge conversations: metavoicing, triggered attending, network‐informed associating, and generative role‐taking. We further theorize mechanisms that affect how people engage in the knowledge conversation, finding that some mechanisms, when activated, will have positive effects on moving the knowledge conversation forward, but others will have adverse consequences not intended by the organization. These emergent tensions become the basis for the implications we draw .