Diffusion of Innovations

Diffusion Theory with Facebook

Diffusion Theory is split into five separate groups of people: Innovator/Pioneers, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. Facebook's initial innovator would be Mark Zuckerberg, who created it after his temporary student rating website, Facemash, went viral. His goal was to connect college students together easily by allowing them to post a wall of information about themselves. Facebook was initially released only to Harvard university and then to a couple other ivy league universities so most of it is early adopters came from those schools. As time went on, Facebook become more and more open to the public until eventually it became fully public to anyone over thirteen years old. Once Facebook was introduced to the public, the early majority joined the website, as it was gaining more and more features to connect people together. Facebook allowed its users to post pictures of what was going on in their lives and tag people who they wanted to either look at their post or tag someone who was in the photo itself. 

The Issues with Facebook

There were and still are, a lot of people who are skeptic about Facebook because they believe that online connections are making people less sociable offline. It is no surprise that the late majority took so long to join it because they were not only mental health related issues associated with Facebook but also privacy issues. Facebook stores all the data that you put into it, every time you click on ad or on a page for too long, it stores how that information as data that can be sold out to third parties. Many promises were made from Zuckerberg himself that peoples data was protected and many people did not care or know enough in the first place for that to affect them. While Facebook is still the most popular social media in the world, there are still those laggards who are worried about their data or do not care enough about Facebook to want to join it. They may benefit from keeping up with those they care about by joining Facebook but if they already contact those people and know what is going on in their life then they do not really need it.