Wissenskommunikation. Ein neues Arbeitsfeld der angewandten Linguistik

Information flood and an "explosion of knowledge" are characteristics of modern societies. The paradoxical consequence is: "The amount of knowledge is increasing, while the capability of the public to participate in knowledge is decreasing" (Ludwig Jäger). Even for experts, knowledge produced in their own domain of expertise is permanently getting less manageable and processible. Against this background, one fundamental problem is becoming more and more prevalent in globalized knowledge societies: What means have to be employed to make information available to the public in general and how can the availability of information be preserved in the long term as an offer for everybody to take adavantage of? In applied linguistics, questions like these have been discussed in recent years, e.g., in the contexts of research on special languages, on layperson-expert-communication, or in various "knowledge transfer sciences". In this paper, several fundamental questions, approaches to answer them, problems that arise along the way and preliminary solutions will be introduced and discussed.