Ever stumbled across a cool idea and thought ‘Wow! I’ve got to tell my friends about this’ but failed to get their attention early on? I found this with quite a few friends with Facebook, who finally signed up as early as last year. Using the theory of diffusion, we know innovations are adopted through stages of early adopters, to the majority of adopters and finally, like my friends mentioned above, the snobs who finally cave. Kadushin (2012) writes that the willingness to adopt certain ideas or tools is due to an individual’s threshold. For example, someone like myself who likes to try out new things jumped onto Facebook in 2007 when less than 10% of my known social network was using the tool. Others, like my snobby friends (haha sorry, you know who you are), have a much higher threshold and held out until closer to 85% of their network was using the tool. The decision on what threshold you have depends on how innovative you like to be with respect to 1) your personal network and 2) your social system. While my lower threshold was motivated by the desire to network outside of my direct personal network and to the wider social system, my friends with higher thresholds resisted as they were motivated to cultivate their personal networks and were highly critical of the impacts of social networking on the wider social system.
I do not mean to criticize the choice to have a higher threshold to innovations when posed to adopt them – it is a personal choice and should remain exactly that, a choice. All the while, I think many of us remember that tipping point when Facebook just exploded before our eyes. It was pretty exciting to be a part of and in my opinion easily worth the ‘guinea pig’ status often associated with being an early adopter.
“The Tipping Point – that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire” (Gladwell).
leahmcyyc 
Hey Leah, nice observation & link b/w Kadushin & network theory & how we operate in “real” social networks… Given your low threshold, you seem like you are a bridge b/w social circles 🙂
This is a great post, it got me to thinking what my experience was when I joined Facebook. I joined the fall of 2007 and I thought I was late in the game. I realize now that I was actually an early adopter! Wow I feel better now! It would be interesting to see how the networks have developed over the past five years. I wonder if there is a way to track when the majority of your friends joined facebook? I noticed you used some stats, did you just estimate or go through your timeline?
It would be very interesting to see the adoption of your friends to Facebook and see if it followed the innovation threshold. I am unaware of any way to measure this. I did use some percentages but those were just rough estimations. I was thinking of my sister who felt forced to join Facebook as her entire social network was now using the tool as a way to plan events and spread news and she felt out of the loop.
Are you a Facebook addict? A #COMM506 Rebuttal to @leahmcyyc blog Small Twitter swarm in conjuntion with @andrealauder #MACT2012
thanks for the insightful rebuttal! I do remember developing habits in earlier Facebook years that I have since stopped practicing where I would check Facebook for updates religiously…especially when writing undergrad papers. I think the worst was checking it every 5 minutes – it was a compulsion I weaned myself off of and then lost interest in all together.