Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Rodger's Diffusion of Innovation

   The diffusion of innovation theory is an observation on the adoption of certain technologies and ideas throughout a populous.

    Though the graph describing the phenomenon shows the "market share" for any technology to reach 100%, this is not always the case, even with technologies and ideas that we assume are universal today. Not every home in American has indoor plumbing, clean water, electricity, or the internet. Not every American believes in those who are not men or not white voting, or believes that the Earth is round. 
    An example of a recent technology on this chart could be email. In the beginning, email was only used by government agencies and large corporations where it was most useful, as it was still primitive and difficult to use. These were the innovators. Next were those who used it for more medium-sized inter-business communications, and the occasional person using the email for personal communication. These are the early adopters. The early majority are those who began using email in the early 2000s via aol.com or Hotmail, who used email rarely for specific circumstances, but happily used it for both personal and electronic communications. After that are the late majority, who likely  are younger people or those who got emails when Gmail came out- at this point, email is being used for thousands of purposes, and over a majority of the country uses it. Lastly are the laggards. These are people who will likely never use email for a variety of reasons. They may not be comfortable with computers, not have internet access, or be wary of people tracking what they send to people. It is these laggards who will prevent the market share from truly reaching 100%.

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