Rogers Activity- Diffusion Discussion

400words

This week will be working on Everett Rogers’ book Diffusion of Innovations, which presents a set of ideas attempting to present a fairly comprehensive explanation of how new ideas and technology are spread from those who already know and/or use the innovation. This book has been through five editions and has been a reference point for quite a few scholars. Rogers is not the only scholar to try to explain these phenomena, but his theories have been very influential and you will very likely find them useful.

As Rogers defines it in the chapter, diffusion is: “…the process by which (1) an innovation (2) is communicated through certain channels (3) over time (4) among the members of a social system.” (11) What Rogers is attempting to do is provide an explanation for differences between innovations on how they are taken up by a population. Even though the innovation may be the same, it is not necessarily adopted in the same ways, and many of these ideas are used to investigate how workplaces attempt to introduce (or suppress) new technologies and approaches.

This chapter is an overview of quite a few ideas, so we’re going to break them down into more accessible chunks. For exploration of the ideas from each of the four major components of Rogers’ definition. Here is the breakdown:

  1. Adoption/Adopter
  2. Technology Clusters
  3. Hardware/Software
  4. Relative Advantage
  5. Compatibility
  6. Complexity
  7. Trialability
  8. Observability
  9. Reinvention
  10. Mass Media / Marketing / Advertising
  11. Heterophily / Homophily
  12. The Innovation-Decision Process
  13. Adopter Categories
  14. Rate of Adoption
  15. System effects
  16. System norms
  17. Opinion Leaders and Change Agents
  18. Types of innovation decisions
  19. Contingent innovation decisions
  20. Consequences of innovations

what you need to do is look at relevant materials from the chapter and post a full response:

  1. Describe the idea from Rogers in your own words.
  2. Provide an example of that explanation in action by documenting it with regards to a different technology currently in the news.

part 2:

You’ll need to comment on at least four posts on other classmates’ Rogers topics

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