Blog post #6 - Diffusion of Innovation

 Tik Tok. An app, a trend, the latest thing. The idea of diffusion of innovation is separated into five different sections. Innovators, the people who create the innovation, early adopters, those who join in before it really takes off, early majority, the rest of the people who get in before everyone but also not the latest people, the late majority, the people who waited it out and decide to hop on with everyone else, and the laggards, the people who just aren't going to take part in the innovation for a variety of reasons. 

The innovators, the creators of tik tok were smart. They took an app that died, Vine, which allowed for very short videos to be shared and then liked and commented on, and almost re-vamped it. Tik tok, which is free, allows anyone with the app to take videos, share videos, view them, like and comment on them, and re make them if the user wanted to. Not to mention it really started to take off at the beginning of Covid-19, when everyone was stuck inside bored with nothing to do. The early adopters I would say had the app before Covid. While it was a thing, just not as popular, this group got on and were just hanging out really. The early majority I would define as the bored people during the infamous lock down. These people already watched all of OBX and All-American and needed something else to do to waste their time, enter tik tok. Now people can just scroll on the their phones watching 15-60 second videos and keep scrolling. The late majority would be the people later during the lockdown who finally got bored and then also the people who heard about all the cool things people would see on it post lockdown. And then we have the laggards, I would define these people in terms of tik tok as a few different things, either people who don't use any newer social media apps and are religious to Facebook, those without smart phones, or people who are seriously busy with their lives and don't just scroll on their phones. 

With a positive being it cured boredom during the lock down there are also some negatives. A big negative is that there is no big restrictions on what can and can't be posted on this app. While you can turn off comments on a video there is still a lot of bullying that can occur and also over sexualizing younger people on the app. I don't think the negatives can out weigh the positives in this app.