Diffusion of Innovations 3/26

Today, we started off by studying a timeline of communication technologies that was printed and given to us. Afterwards we played a game of Kahoot based off the timeline about when specific types of technology were invented such as the radio, television, cell phones, personal computers/laptops and telegraphs. Professor Smith mentioned whoever won the game would win eleven dollars. After our game of Kahoot, Professor Smith talked about Rogers Diffusion of Innovations (or Ideas) and mentioned how he was talking to a biology teacher who is teaching the same thing in her class. He spoke about the four factors which included the innovation itself, communication channels, the passage of time and social networks. He talked about the ways in which we communicate these days compared to the ways used to communicated years ago. Professor Smith mentioned how he only communicated and stayed in touch with people for his journalism job via email, now we have social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter. All different types of ways one can communicate with one another. Professor Smith created a graph that shows the comparison between, Pioneers and Innovators, the Early Adapters, Early majority, Late Adapters and Laggards comparing the time between them. Newer innovations such as Facebook and Instagram caught on quickly and spread all over the world. This is mostly due to the communication channel of computers. So many people were early adaptors because it was a truly a unique product that helped them make and keep personal connections. There are always negative consequences to new technologies. In this case, the negatives include over sharing, exclusion, focusing on the number of friends rather than the quality of your friends.