Diffusion of Innovations

 Diffusion of Innovations is a theory that was created by Everett Rogers in 1962 and talks about new technology or ideas that are communicated and popularized through Society. it's interesting to see how the innovation itself, adopters, communication channels, time, and a social system All come together to make a new technology super popular and used by many people in the modern-day age.

I feel like one of the easiest examples to talk about in this sense is TikTok because of its massive popularity in the last couple of years since covid-19. The innovation was not something that was brand new but borrowed from a past form of social media called Vine and there was a generation of people who just loved those videos that were seven seconds long and really were upset when Vine went out of business. The creator of TikTok, Zhang Yiming, noticed that there were a lot of people who were missing this app and decided to take advantage of that by using the same sort of style of short videos that were packed full of comedy, information, or entertainment for the generation that has the smallest attention span of all generations. 

Yiming saw that this was the target demographic he wanted to go after and succeeded. When you look at the demographic of TikTok as a whole almost 67% of users are in the age group of 19 to 18 and that's the heart of Gen Z. This demographic spends the most time on social media and on average people spend one and a half hours on TikTok per day and that only goes up with the target demographic.

 TikTok was heavily shared through Instagram because there were so many people that were sharing their TikTok through Instagram and this led to a blue and popularity because of the already active user base of Instagram since they targeted the younger generation the use of social media is way up and created a boom in the popularity of TikTok. Since the Gen Z generation is so used to sharing and communicating through social media that just helped the Boost and popularity of TikTok tenfold because of how Yiming saw his target demographic and how they communicated the most. The people that were not in the target demographic were lagging in the ways and did not use the app due to privacy problems and their linkage to China. 

Now when you look at TikTok you could see that there is a saturation of the app in North America and many other places around the world. TikTok kept on adding new features like longer videos and more edit options in the videos themselves. They try to put themselves back in the timeline and have new people be pioneers of their new features. But despite all the new things, which may create hype for a little bit of time, TikTok is still at the tipping point or past that point in America. 

Society has been heavily impacted by the use of TikTok and there has been so much more information and entertainment that has been shared through the app when I look at it from an outsider's perspective because I do not have a TikTok I feel as if it's a negative thing for the community to be so invested in celebrities and influencers through TikTok. I feel as if that's not the only reason that it's a bad thing I think that people spend so much time on the app and it really takes away from the inner personal communication that you can have with the people around you when you're so encapsulated by your phone through a social media app such as TikTok. There may be some positives to it but I think that the negatives outweigh the positives for the use of TikTok in America