I will go the generic route for this post and examine social media through the lens of Diffusion Theory. There are two ways this could be done: either looking at social media as a whole or looking at one social media platform in particular. I am going to go with the former.
The main reason why I think social media caught on as much as it did is just because people like it. They like seeing what their friends are up to, and social media makes that really easy. I think many people adopted it early because they were tech savvy and realized this was going to make it easier to do that. Many late adopters were likely peer pressured into it. All their friends are on it, so why aren’t they?
There are many downsides though, which are likely the reason why most laggards have still not adopted social media. I personally am a laggard, so I can speak for myself on this one. The primary issue with social media, for me, is its complete lack of privacy. There are two angles to this. First, I do not want random corporations to know everything about me. They have a bad habit of using peoples personal information to manipulate them into developing an addiction. I do not need that in my life. I also do not really want to be connected with my friends via social media either. I find it to be shallow and superficial. If I want to have friends, I want to have real friends, not internet friends. If they want to tell me what they did last weekend, they can do that in person. Those downsides do not outweigh, or completely negate the disadvantages of social media for myself and likely for other laggards too.
I do not think being a laggard is necessarily a bad thing, nor is being an early adopter necessarily a good thing. I think the qualities of the positions on the curve vary a lot from technology to technology and from person to person. Yes, being an early adopter can make you rich or famous sometimes, but a lot of the time you just end up wasting your energy. Yes, being a laggard can make you miss out on some of your friends lives, but it can also protect you from major privacy violations. The quality of each role is not necessarily fixed, but something to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
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