Social Media in Science: There are Innovators and Then There are Laggards

I know it’s really frustrating to be a promoter or founder of a social media web site that want to engage the scientists. The whole idea of socializing the scientists using these website is not coming well and unfortunately scientists aren’t warming to social media. No doubt scientists are reluctant to embrace the power of social media because there are technological as well cultural barriers. In my personal experience majority of scientists are not well aware about potential of web 2.0 and social media tools, for example of most of scientist never use bookmarking tools like Delicious or online citations managers such as CiteUlike or Connectea. In summary they are not very tech savvy and some time it is really hard to explain how to interact with bookmarklets. I also think there is no way you can make it more easier than this. Why majority of scientists are slow to adopt a new innovation, technology, or ideas? Well the answer to this question is not so easy but this behavior can be explained in terms of Rogers model for the adoption and diffusion of innovations. Everett M. Rogers was professor at Stanford University, and he is famously known for his book “Diffusion of Innovations” which describe how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread across communities. Innovation could better be understood as a new emerging technology, concept or idea such as social media or web 2.0, while diffusion is characterize as spread of innovation through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. Rogers classifies adopters of innovations into five distinct categories:

• Innovators (Risk takers, eager to try new ideas, can be assumed as gatekeepers of diffusion dynamics)
• Early Adopters (Opinion leaders, more socially forward, experiment with new ideas in a careful way)
• Early Majority (Intellectual people, careful but adopt the trends more quickly than the average)
• Late Majority (Skeptic people, follow the trend after the majority of society has adopted)
• Laggards (Conservative people with belief in conventional ways, tend to be advanced in age)

What is really interesting about this theory is role of early adopter. It suggest that diffusion amongst opinion leaders or early adopters holds the key to innovation diffusion as a whole, which also reminds us that an attempt to reach to masses will not work unless you have already convinced the early adopters. Ideally social media people should be worried about early adopters and critical masses first. The real challenge for any social media for science is transition from the early adopter group to the point of critical mass which requires appropriate majors from the very beginning to target the early majority. This is a point of no return in the diffusion dynamics, which means if critical mass have adopted the trend then innovation has become self-sustaining. Adaptation of innovation become more easy if there are already existing communities related to new innovation – formal or informal. Apart from that these tools must have few intrinsic characteristics such as greater relative advantage, compatibility, trialability and observability. The key is keeping it simple and less complex but still retain the visibility. I am very sure that Rogers’s innovation dynamics is not only applicable to social media in science but also for issues related to openness in science such as open access.