Knowledge Community

My Knowledge Community

My knowledge community is like a connection of dominoes. It takes one person and the information trickles down through everybody from just one person. It

is spread through media and technology to reach a mass group of people. I don’t have just one knowledge community. My communities stream through Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and text messaging. These types of communications are for the purpose of fun or school.

My knowledge community is small. It consists of my classmates, my sorority, clubs I am in, just little groups like that. We are just different special interest groups who spread information to

each other. Any one of us can be the originator of the message we want to spread using whatever media form our network of communication is set up on. We also have the availability to set up new media to become for efficient! For example, my sorority has a Facebook group and an e-mail list that all members are on. Not everybody checks her e-mail and Facebook everyday, and not everyone has a smart phone, so we converted to the Gin System. It is a system that allows us to send mass text messages through the Internet.

Large knowledge communities also surround me. These are larger groups were I am unable to start the domino effect, it is a community that is much larger than I and my peers among me. This is through people in the community that are conveying information like the news media that are of interest to more than just my smaller communities. These are broader things that affect a majority of people.

My knowledge community has been formed my media convergence. All of the media and technology outlets I listed above were though media convergence. Without these I would have to way to have formed or be apart of my knowledge communities because I would not have been put in a position to where I may receive and send information on such a regular basis. I suppose the old-fashioned knowledge community, or my mother’s current knowledge community could have been sending Christmas cards every year. It is sending

her special interest group, in this case her friends, an update on my family.

The knowledge community also brings in a lot of communication discourse communities that are formed. These could be portals and blogs that people can follow, fan sites with an interactional medium that groups of a Knowledge Community can spread and relay ideas, not just send out information. This is important for innovation and making sure people within the community are heard. This has more of a ping-pong effect that the other mediums like Twitter and Facebook. Those who are sharing ideal are ones who also want to read the ideas of others.

I think my theory of a knowledge community is much more simplified than Jenkins, but it is a simple concept and I like to put it in simple terms. The domino effect is easy and accessible way to describe something of this nature. My communities big or small all originate from a source that has something new to spread to those interested.