What is social knowledge? The page provides several definitions or context being used for social knowledge. There is clearly different perspectives - each being relevant to their own fields. My objective in an upper division undergraduate course is to introduce them to a very complex field of study.
Development psychology focuses on how social interaction influences the development of knowledge. A collection of articles edited by Ulrich Mueller, Jeremy I.M. Carpendale, Nancy Budwig and Bryan Sokol address this topic in Social Life and Social Knowledge: Toward a Process Account of Development. The book reviews "the nature and type of interactions that promote development as well as the conceptual frameworks used to explain the relation between individuals and groups."
Scientists, such as evolutionary biologists, pursue the idea that "solving social problems has driven the evolution of intelligence, not only in humans but also in other big-brained species." The so-called social intelligence hypothesis resulted in recent observations of primates (geladas) that exhibit social knowledge of individuals they remember in their surroundings.
Stephen Downes, with a background in online learning research, and others contributed to the p2p Foundation wiki page on Social Knowledge. They define social knowledge as "a result of the connections between the individual members of society, resident in no single one of them, but rather a property of the society working as a whole". They point out that social knowledge is "not merely the aggregation and averaging of individual knowledge" noting such an aggregation is unlikely.
The KM Wiki defines social knowledge as "Knowledge is embodied in people gathered in communities and networks. The road to knowledge is via people, conversations, connections and relationships. Knowledge surfaces through dialog, all knowledge is socially mediated and access to knowledge is by connecting to people that know or know who to contact." Source may be entry in blog knowledge-at-work.The Social Knowledge website considers themselves a collection of peer community networks. They foster online communities so that people with similar interests can connect to harness the distributed expertise of the members. they state "The participants collaborate and manage their community while constantly providing feedback that is used to shape and extend the features of each Social Knowledge Network™".Software developers, such as InMagic, take an IT orientation to the definition. They see Social Knowledge Networks (SKNs) as "virtual environments where content combines with human resource assets and subject matter expertise (SME) to address critical business initiatives and problems ranging from product innovation and proposal development to competitive intelligence and consumer insight. SKNs span enterprise silos and merge relevant content, search, and community insight, improving individual and organizational productivity, efficiency and agility." This is a traditional orientation towards knowledge management within an enterprise.
Social knowledge is not always about speaking (e.g., collaboration-based) but listening. The article Sharpening the Tool Set speaks to how SAS helps you listen to customers. Most companies don't listen very well and 3 out of 4 unaware of what their customers thought about them. See the free report The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action conducted by Harvard Business Review.
Social knowledge is fragile. Digg alienated its audience (social network) by a massive website redesign and lost 30% of its traffic. (link)
A related topic is social innovation which may be referred to as crowdsourcing. Sitting Pretty (Time International) tells the story of made.com which disintermediates furniture middlemen and sells directly to public based on their votes for a furniture design.
Will social knowledge ever replace face-to-face knowledge? Consider the following from a Fortune article on the demise of the video store:
"No matter how good Netflix’s algorithms get, they’re never going to be as good as the well-versed movie geek behind the counter, reading your body language and knowing just what movie you need to watch that night. Being able to physically engage with the merchandise, to hold a title in your hands and gauge whether you want to see it, is another lost experience. In terms of supplying information, a full-scale DVD case beats a thumbnail image and brief summary every time." Liz Shannon Miller, Fortune