Diffusion of Innovations

 Emoticons, better known as emojis caught on so quickly due to the fact they were easy ways of communicating and expressing emotions. It is easy to say that people became early adopters because of the exciting new idea and way of communicating with desired others. Once it was known that emoticons were being used, it immediate intrigued others and encouraged them to follow the trend. Emojis are a very creative concept, so when the announcement of them came it was clear to see they would take a grasp on society.

There are five very distinct sections of the diffusion of innovation theory. The first section, or group, is the innovators. The innovators are the people that would like to be the first to try things and/or test new ideas and creations. A great example of innovators are the people that had camped outside the apple store in order to buy the first iPhone. The next section of the diffusion of innovation theory is the early adapters. Early adapters are the people that like to take risks and promote new opportunities when it comes to an invention. Thirdly there are the early majority. The early majority are the people that like to know an invention is good before they go and buy it. This tends to be when an invention gets popular and people begin to buy it. The fourth section of the theory is taken over by the late majority. The late majority are the people that are scared of change and tend to refrain from any type of change. The very last section of the theory is devoted to the laggards. Laggards are traditionalists that are extremely hard to get interested in new inventions. 

            

With all positives there are negatives. In this case, the early adopters and early majority would consist of those that supported the idea of a new way to communicate with others and using emojis constantly. This group of people is most likely younger generations such as teenagers and 20s-40s. On the other hand, you had people that didn’t love the idea of new communication and found that these emoticons were actually hurting our language. This next group of people are the older generation that typically don't know much about technology and like to stick to the way things use to be. There are also people like traditionalists that believe that emojis are the reason people refrain from using sentence structure and proper grammar when texting or online communicating, these people would also be grouped within the late majority and laggards. The majority of the laggard population would include people that truly hate the idea of changing how we communicate with each other and push for the idea of grammar being important, even if it is on posts, tweets, texts, etc. 

            After mentioning the downfalls presented by traditionalists it can be easy to see why some people chose not to use emojis at all. One may choose to focus on their grammar and sentence structure rather than focusing on quickly getting their point across through icons. If this person was to start using emoticons, they would save time, present more emotion when communicating with others, and avoid confusion through wording. As you can see, there are both positive and negatives of the use of emoticons but in this case I must say that positives outweigh the negatives. Emojis have created a type of new language that helps humans communicate quicker and more efficiently, although they cause some issues involving less worry about grammar and/or sentence structures.