Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations ft. Twitter

Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations is an expansive theory you can apply to any technology, to assess the rise and stream of spreading technology. It uses the percentage share of 4 groups of adopters of that technology, and each technology could share a different curve depending on its life cycle. The four groups are split into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and the laggards. 

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In terms of a technology we didn't cover in our timeline, I wanted to talk about Twitter. It's a highly trafficked network even used by our own President for communications, and has enjoyed a quick rise and long period of relevance. I would say that the innovators of this technology were those who started tinkering with the technology when it was in beta or when it hadn't been released to the public just yet, in the very early 2000s. These folks tested out the viability and possibility of this platform, and even at its most basic state, they knew this could really be a helpful tool to people.

The early adopters of Twitter were often celebrities and those in public life, who people cared to keep up with. These personalities could update the public on their goings-on, or entertain followers with their thoughts and musings. Celebrity traffic started coming up in the 2009 timeframe. The use of this platform by these really popular people gave way to an even bigger demographic adopting it.

Young people! Teenagers! These folks of this generation grew up learning and being entertained by the internet, and its growing compatibility with social networking. With the IM craze to Facebook, young people were the early majority of those trying out and creating the norms of these services. Twitter was no exception! Young people made this site hip, and relevant to older folks who were keen on internet or needed internet trends to assess publics. This went down in around 2012-13. 

The late majority has been mostly older adults or professionals who have come to the site to express themselves in a new way, or professional people and advertisers that use the space to get traffic for their product or service! This is an incredibly important feature of twitter today. Sponsored trending pages or profiles are what networks many strategic messages to young and old people around the world, and so while it took a minute for these groups to notice the power of ads on social media, they didn't take long. By 2015, ads were everywhere on Twitter!

Source Intel:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Twitter

TED response

I was really fascinated by Darieth Chrisholm's TED Talk. I have seen firsthand the implications of revenge porn's rise, particularly in the advent of social media, and I can say that there are more horror stories than successes in battling this. 

I remember in middle school, Snapchat had just caught on, and people in my year were frequently using the service to send videos or images of themselves naked/in sexually promiscuous positions to those they were either dating or courting at the time. I had always found it to be a terrible idea, and I don't even think I got snapchat until high school because I didn't get why people used it, I was a laggard, if you will. 

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But, there was a girl in my grade, who didn't think it was such a terrible idea. And as it turns out, her idea got saved and spread around the circles of boys at my school within an instant. Video content or photographic content showing a minor nude or in sexual acts is ILLEGAL by all standards, but a boyfriend of hers clearly had no regard for this and sent and spread her personal communications to him around. She ended up facing severe criticism and bullying for the video, and I think it was likely a really traumatic experience. 

Having witnessed this, I can really see why dealing with this phenomenon is so frustrating, especially if you don't know what the resources are or don't have any. I hope that with the proper education, we can teach young people to be so careful with anything they share on the internet, but especially so anything that can be used against them in such a damaging way. The lack of legal pathways to help women through this process also needs to be attended to, because without proper channels and resources, people will be afraid to come forward and try to get their situation solved. 

the good, bad, and the ugly of citizen journalism!

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For my EOTO topic, I was excited to cover what is known as "citizen journalism". This phenomenon has existed for a long time, but has seen a serious rise in the advent of social media and smartphones. Citizen journalism is, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, "journalism that is conducted by people who are not professional journalists but who disseminate information using Web sites, blogs, and social media". This practice of using real-time technologies to produce real-time coverage of events has been praised and criticized for good reasons. 

Some stories are simply unreachable for professional journalists. Conditions in a given location may be too dangerous, or accessing a location might be too logistically difficult, or an event just happens too quickly for them to see it and report on it. However, with cameras, recording devices, and platforms to share among wide sets of peoples, stories that are typically unreachable are now being told. Even better, these stories are being told and shared by direct witnesses to that story. This is a great thing for bringing new voices and typically unheard voices out to tell stories, and can provide meaningful content for real journalists to work from as well.

However, this comes with strings attached. Citizen journalists are at the end of the day, just citizens. Not to knock the everyday person, but there is no replacement for proper journalistic training, and without it mistakes can and do happen. When you've got a source that is not objective, that can edit or manipulate events to mislead, with no ethical guidelines or standards to uphold, you can run into serious problems with this content. Media outlets need to be responsible in their use of citizen journalist footage, and provide the checks necessary to deliver an accurate and comprehensive report. 

This is a really important and relevant aspect of journalism today, and I was happy to get to talk more about its implications, I hope my presentation was informative.






Origin Intel For This Post, Because I'm Too Poor To Even Entertain The IDEA of Plagiarism:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/citizen-journalism

my own presentation

media consolidation!

I thought that this particular topic was really interesting among the EOTO presentations, particularly because this is an element of the mediasphere that is made blatantly obvious to us, but seems hidden all the same.


Something that really got me thinking about this was the startup of Disney Plus, the all Disney streaming service that includes properties of Marvel, National Geographic, Pixar, and all the other media properties Disney has its hand in. Simply browsing through this list really got me thinking about how insane it is that Disney could own SO many different media companies under one umbrella. It's impressive, yet kind of scary for media representation if you think about it.

see link for source

Disney is only one of many culprits of media consolidation, realistically only a few companies control all of the media you see. This means that while each media channel within a conglomerate has its own "theme", you're really getting the story that one entity has cleared. This can be a real issue for independence and dissidence in journalism, and so the pursestrings really matter.

tell me this doesn't scare you! see link for source

I appreciated this presentation, and all of the other ones, because they really did a great job highlighting the individual implications of each topic in relation to freedoms we have. Great work, y'all!