Blog Post Seven

 Diffusion Theory

        The Diffusion Theory is a concept that was created to understand how technology gains momentum over time and through different populations. The theory is visualized as a bell curve (see above) to separate each population and how it is presented to the following population. 

    

    The bell curve begins with the innovators or pioneers. This community of people allows for conversation about the innovation of the idea to initiate conversation. Hence, they are people who take risks on ideas and begin the experimenting process. Following the innovators, is the early adopters' population who enjoy technology and trying new things. They get the momentum of trying these new things with the innovators' research and studies. Following the early innovators, we move into introducing the early majority who are people that begin to see trends and try technological products that influence the majority of society to also use the product. Next, the late majority allows for those who take after the early majority and follow the trends that everyone else around them is using. They are described to be "people skeptical of change, and will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority." The last and final part of this bell curve and theory for the innovations of our world are the laggards. These types of people resist the trends but are cautious with decisions and do extensive research before purchasing said innovation. 

    The innovation that I can rely on the theory to briefly explain is social media applications, TikTok for example. TikTok is a social media application that allows one to see short videos that influencers and friends may post. Because of the negative connotation around TikTok and how the government may be following out on every move around TikTok, people have become hesitant.

    TikTok was once called Music.ly and this application was bought by ByteDance Ltd to make TikTok. That company would be the innovator of TikTok by trying the application and making it to be something new. Since then, the early adopters allowed for releases of information about the boom of TikTok and how they can see the success that TikTok will soon convey. Since then, the early adopters made TikTok popular, there are now over 2 billion mobile downloads. The early adopters then influenced the late adopters, and we see this in older generations who are not as used to the success of social media applications. And finally, the smart people, the laggards who do their research see all the negatives about TikTok which is more than one may think so they continue to be without the application.