Social Media as a Field for Knowledge Creation

With the rapid development of media technology, social media has become an important field for knowledge creation and caught a lot of people's attention. An interdisciplinary research that combines management and sociology to explain the complex online actions of posting behaviors and settings for knowledge creation is necessary. With the method of online ethnography “Netnography”, through the the forms of immersive participant observation, individual interview and literature analysis, this article focuses on the field in which knowledge creation takes place from the perspective of field theory, details the conversion between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, especially the flow of explicit knowledge on social media. Social media is considered as the foundation for knowledge creation. The explicit knowledge actors posted becomes a database for others, or can be combined with existing information and new knowledge generates. It can also become a pseudo-environment or a context for actors. During the interaction, different sub-fields, such as private sub-field, group sub-field and public sub-field of knowledge creation are formed. The strategies for knowledge creation and their influence factors are also discussed in this article. This interdisciplinary analysis is valuable for re-examining knowledge creation on social media and leveraging the strengths of actors for knowledge sharing and production.