Rogers' Theory within Facebook

    Facebook has had a long journey since being founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg. During this time Facebook has been praised but also reprimanded for sharing information. There are people that love Facebook, there are people that hate Facebook and there are people that have no idea what Facebook is doing on the other side of the screen. After applying Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation theory to the social media site Facebook we can better see how the 2.85 billion users have jumped on board and decided to use Facebook. 

    Rogers' theory goes on to explain how, why, and the rate at which new ideas catch and spread. There are four main elements that influence the spread of a new idea, the innovation of itself, communication channels, time, and social systems. It breaks down the rate of adoption and recognizes as a point in which it will reach the critical mass. There are five different groups that make up the adopters of an idea, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. You can read more about Rogers' theory here. Below I will break down the 5 groups and identify the people that I believe fit into each group. 

• Innovators
• The innovators of Facebook would have been the original target market of college students that Facebook was created for. Those colleges were; BC, Berkeley, Brown, BU, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emery, Florida, Georgetown, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, Michigan State, MIT, Northeastern, Northwestern, NYU, Penn, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Tulane, Tuffs, UC Davis, UCLA, UC San Diego, UNC, UVA, WashU, Wellesley, and Yale.
• Early adopters
• The early adopters of Facebook I believe would have been other college student that learned about the site from friends at other colleges. 
• Early majority 
• The early majority of Facebook users could have been MySpace users who were forced to Facebook after the MySpace site shutdown in 2008. In addition, other users could have been people that were not in college during the time of creation such as people in their late 20s and early 30s. 
• Late majority 
• The late majority of users would have been older people and people who were children when it was first created. I also believe that people within other countries would have been a part of the late majority. 
• Laggards
• The Laggards of Facebook would be people who were or are skeptical of Facebook, those who were the oldest of users because of the learning curve present with social media. I also would argue to say that the laggards are children that are just now becoming old enough to use the site. 

    Overall Facebook is an innovation that is hard for the majority to resist. It has grown extremely fast and is not slowing down. On the downside, Facebook has been reprimanded for the actions of selling users' information and also using AI to further influence what people do in real life. You can learn more about Facebook's usage of AI through the video In the Age of AI. When choosing to use Facebook we have to be aware of what we are signing up for but the only way to truly protect yourself is to abstain from all social media. For some people, the positives outweigh the negatives and for others, the negatives outweigh the positives but one must choose based on their beliefs. If they feel as if Facebook is a site that is willing to protect their privacy one should use it if not they should probably not. There will always be positives and negatives but each individual has to choose if one outweighs the other. Rogers' theory helps to explain how and why people help spread new ideas and technologies.