From Distributed Knowledge to Intelligent Knowledge- Creating Systems

We live now in a networked world where enormous amounts of information are constantly produced and spread. Knowledge is distributed among the growing number of actors; it is loosely structured and coordinated. At the same time, knowledge is more and more specialized. The rapid growth of communications has not brought about a creative breakthrough. Yet knowledge-based society is impossible without constant creation of fundamentally new knowledge. Advanced collaboration mechanisms are the possible response to the growing diversity and pressure of information. However, there is still no model of collective knowledge creation that would make ivory towers merge into open ecosystems of knowledge- knowledge-creating systems. We argue that the possibility to develop and implement such a model lies in understanding the mechanism of real-time micro-level social interaction (knowledge creation ritual) that allows networks of intellectuals to act as a loosely connected yet unified whole. The model we elaborate brings together thinking, emotional energy, and communication and links micro-level cognitive processes to large-scale network structures, figuring out the opportunities to continuously produce new knowledge. We discuss how the system of knowledge production should be socially organized in order to produce maximum effect of the mechanisms of collective knowledge creation