Ewolucja i rola pojęcia „treść” (ang. content) w społeczeństwie opartym o informację i wiedzę

Abstract

In today’s information society and knowledge based economy one of the main development factors is the use of electronic forms of creating and conveying information. However, there is a terminological and management problem with the volume of the processed information as well as the increasing number and variety of forms of presenting and conveying the information. In the last few years the fields of socio-economic sciences as well as technical and engineering studies have encompassed a new keyword – “content”, which in the Polish terminology is usually translated as “treść”. The language of economy, management and IT have lastingly embraced such terms as Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, Content Marketing or the most recent ones – Social Content or Content Governance. Content is an abstract and multi-meaning term whose use, despite its huge popularity, leads to many ambiguities and causes many interpretation problems. The first research question posed in this paper is – for how long has the term content been functioning in our environment? The paper presents the evolution of electronic information forms processed in IT systems for several decades now. The paper offers a broad definition of the term content as well as its most recent form –intelligent content. The second research problem presented in the paper involve the relations between the term content and the classic hierarchical concept – i.e. the Data–Information–Knowledge–Wisdom model (DIKW). The first conclusion is the statement that content is a category that encompasses the following processed in electronic form: data, information and the part of knowledge that can be formalized and recorded, i.e. explicit knowledge. The second conclusion from analyzing the functions played by content in the process of the organizational creation of knowledge is that content is the most important strategic medium in knowledge management within an information and knowledge based society.