Innovation in the Age of Facebook
H1N1 seems to be everywhere the past few weeks (including, I believe, inside me right now). A specifically hot topic of debate has been the inoculation process and whether or not vaccines will kill you. I don’t personally put a lot of faith in the anti-vaccinators, but haven’t gotten caught up in the debate because a) I don’t have any children and b) I’ve always gotten vaccinated anyway and never had any issues. Well, that is until this year. When I didn’t get vaccinated and I know have something (maybe it’s a cold, regular flu, H1Ni; not sure). So there’s that. Plus, I don’t generally believe the government uses vaccination for population or mind control. Of course, if they were, that’s exactly what they would want me to think. So who knows!
Digressing, Jason Kottke had a post earlier this week briefly recounting a history of inoculation. While the process has been known for around 1200 years, it wasn’t until the past 300 or so that it took off. From Wikipedia, Kotte selects:
The practice is documented in America as early as 1721, when Zabdiel Boylston, at the urging of Cotton Mather, successfully inoculated two slaves and his own son. Mather, a prominent Boston minister, had heard a description of the African practice of inoculation from his Sudanese slave, Onesimus, in 1706, but had been previously unable to convince local physicians to attempt the procedure. Following this initial success, Boylston began performing inoculations throughout Boston, despite much controversy and at least one attempt upon his life. The effectiveness of the procedure was proven when, of the nearly three hundred people Boylston inoculated during the outbreak, only six died, whereas the mortality rate among those who contracted the disease naturally was one in six.
What stands out most from this history is the role of Mather. Mather, a “socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister, prolific author, and pamphleteer” is what would be called an opinion leader. According to diffusion theory (and more on that below) an opinion leader is the most important factor in the spread of an innovation throughout a society. Mather was influential and of high status. When he used and then advocated inoculation, others in the community took note of this and were less hesitant to adopt a strange and relatively unknown process. The success of the inoculation is less important to its spread than the role of Mather as an advocate.
Diffusions of Innovations as graphed by Rogers
Diffusion of Innovations is “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system.” The theory, largely assembled and developed by scholar Everett Rogers, has been around for around 45 years and is the most useful explanation for why certain innovations and technologies succeed and why others fail (it’s a lot like Gladwell’s Tipping Point, but less magical). Rogers developed the 5 stages of adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. He also pinpointed what I feel are the most influential participants in the process: Opinion Leaders.
The opinion leaders are those who help to spread the innovation (or to kill it if they do not accept it). They are generally educated, wealthier, higher status cosmopolites that a community looks to for advice and guidance. Their acceptance of an innovation acts as a seal of approval for that innovation to proceed, and it typically does. Which explains why inoculation would spread after being used, successfully, by Cotton Mather. He was an influential man whose actions and advice were accepted and followed.
In the past these opinion leaders worked at the local level. Relying on face-to-face interactions and interpersonal communications, these opinion leaders would spread an innovation throughout their community and to opinion leaders in neighboring communities, who would do the same to their own communities, on and on, until the innovation had reached market share.
What we see now, however, is innovation reaching market share faster and faster. A popular video a few months back broke down how many years it took a few technologies to reach 50 million users. Radio took 38 years, TV took 13 years, the Internet took 3, and Facebook added 100 million in 9 months. Now, this is a bit disingenuous because it took Facebook longer than 9 months to reach 50 million, which is why the video obfuscates a bit … but still 100 million adds in 9 months is a fantastical number.
What I see here is a conflation of the diffusion process. Facebook (and all social media, in fact) integrates both the innovation and the opinion leaders into one platform. It’s an innovation for connecting people, adopted by people most known for connecting people. In hind site, the viral potential for this is outstanding … as we have now seen.
So that explains its success (in the most simplistic way, of course. I mean, if it were that easy, every single social media site ever would succeed based on the principal of connecting connectors. Which is clearly not true. But for my purpose, we’ll leave it here). But, Facebook has now moved beyond an innovation and become, essentially, a medium in and of itself. It is now a conduit for social networks that could previously only exist offline. New networks are formed. Old networks are reinforced. But with less (virtually no) limitations to network size.
What I’m proposing is that social media is replicating the old face-to-face interpersonal relationships of a community into an online sphere. The opinion leaders, innovators and early adapters are moving (have already moved) online and their networks are growing exponentially larger than they could in their real-world communities. This means that the potential to spread innovation throughout a society is now easier and harder. Easier because it can spread farther and quicker. But at the same time harder, because it will face increased competition as more and more people attempt to capitalize on these growing networks.
