From Distributed Knowledge to Intelligent Knowledge-Creating Systems

A prominent feature of contemporary societies is ceaseless production and diffusion of large amounts of information. Under such conditions knowledge gets distributed among growing numbers of actors, becomes dispersed and narrowly specialized. As a result, the rapid growth of information and communications does not bring about any creative breakthrough in knowledge production, while constant creation of fundamentally new knowledge is crucial to building the knowledge society. A possible response to this situation is to develop new forms of intellectual collaboration, which would take advantage of progress in communications and of new forms of organization. No model of collective knowledge creation has been suggested so far that would make ivory towers merge into the open systems of knowledge. We argue that a possibility to develop and implement such a model lies in unfolding the mechanism of co-evolution of knowledge, communication and emotional energy in intellectual networks which would allow the latter to act as a loosely connected and yet unified whole. In the paper, we bring together knowledge, emotional energy, and communication while simultaneously linking the micro-level knowledge-creation ritual to the large-scale structural coupling of network structures, in order to outline the theoretical ground for a model of effective knowledge-creating system.