Social Software and the Evolution of User Expertise: Future Trends in Knowledge Creation and Dissemination

摘要

Since its beginnings in the sixties, with Arpanet, continuing with the introduction of hypertext in the eighties, and the browser in the nineties, the Internet has drastically changed institutions, and simply the way that people do things. The way we learn, communicate, diffuse information, and disseminate knowledge, are without a doubt some of those very things, and with the emergence of the so called Social Web, or Web 2.0, the changes were even more drastic. New concepts such as Blogs, wikis, and social networks placed people in the center of the action, thus becoming the primary actors and this can be look at in a two-folded way. On the one hand, people are primary actors in the sense that they are the source of information, and on the other hand, they are primary actors in the sense that they select the information that they consume. One implication is that traditional sources of expertise are challenged. It can be said that "social software facilitates an environment of information abundance, while complicating the traditional conceptualizations of source expertise. New forms of expertise are arising, rooted in the experience of individuals rather than based on their formal credentials."