How do features of social media influence knowledge sharing? An ambient awareness perspective

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to verify the relationship between the features of social media and knowledge sharing, and to examine how ambient awareness mediates this relationship. Design/methodology/approach An experiment is designed to stimulate the knowledge work in a famous Chinese business college and 156 valid samples were obtained. AMOS was used in this paper to examine the theoretical model. Findings There is a correlation among features of social media, ambient awareness and knowledge sharing. Surprisingly, network translucence, which indicates individuals’ meta-knowledge of others’ connections, has no influence on knowledge sharing. Although this is inconsistent with conjecture of the existing literature, it can be well explained by the phenomenon in real life, such as privacy setting in social media. Practical implications For employees who use social media to promote knowledge sharing within organizations, this study reminds them of the importance of ambient awareness. For managers, this study can give them some suggestions to make employees take full advantage of social media to achieve optimal benefits of knowledge sharing, thus improving organizational performance and innovation. For social media designers, they can make social media more useful in knowledge work by improving its specific features. Originality/value This paper proposes that ambient awareness is the mediator of the effect path between communication and knowledge sharing. And the status perception of coworkers’ exchanging information is closely related to knowledge sharing.

Conclusion

This chapter reflects on contexts of contemporary urbanism, and on artistic experiments with perspective and sensory perception, to develop a concept of ambient awareness as a mode of inhabiting mediated cities. Ambient awareness refers to the sensibility that attends to the field by relating elements that are peripheral to each other and organising them into a new form. This chapter argues that large screens constitute a key platform for both the new aesthetic genre of ambient art and the emergence of new forms of public communication. It outlines the concept ‘ambient perspective’ as a means for clarifying: the dynamics of interaction in knowledge production; the sensory processes in play in the casual observer’s reactions to urban screens; and the more general activities of symbolic and cognitive work in the media city.