Technology Diffusion and Showing Early Adoption Bravery
Among the flock of buzzwords to appear in the blockchain and crypto space in last 4–5 years is the “Crypto Early Adopter”: those who had the foresight to become involved early in digital currencies and so nowadays tell a story either of profit, missed opportunity (or both) and deeper wisdom gained as a result.
While not every self-declared Early Adopter is what they say they are, and there’s no clear outline of what constitutes ‘Early’, the notion is an important one in answering the question of whether cryptocurrencies or blockchain will take root securely in future.
‘Early Adopter’ is not a neologism. The concept has origins in the ‘Theory of Innovation Diffusion’, which is seen as a key piece of research as people speculate about when crypto will break through what we might call the “Use-case barrier”. People look back and forth from entrepreneurs and developers to the regulatory bodies, wondering if circumstances will allow a “Tipping Point”, leading to a phase of mass adoption of crypto in daily life.
Decisions by individuals to use a new technology — and their thought processes as they decide if it is trustworthy — are at the heart of the theory.
Everett Rogers (1931–2004) was the sociologist and communications theorist who proposed it in the early 1960s. In booming, postwar America new products were flashing across the horizon, then becoming quotidian: a plethora of cars for new motorways, jukeboxes and vending machines and countless home appliances–and of course, the TV, which soon began to diffuse information about yet more devices on the way.
It was all a highly effective means of expressing American optimism and mastery of technology as well as a distraction from the memories of WW2 and the anxiety of the Cold War and its attendant crises.
Anyone taking up a new technology was an “Adopter,” and adopters were divided into “innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards”. Innovators were often beneficiaries of high status and financial independence, with these allowing them to absorb the risks of adopting failed innovation. The early adopters meanwhile, who also have status and capital at their disposal, have the highest degree of “opinion leadership” among all the categories. They are “more discreet” in their adoption choices than innovators, and use their choices to “maintain a central communication position.” Rogers [1962], Diffusion of innovations (p.283)
Feel free to apply this to the digital era. Think of the relative geekiness of Steve Wozniak next to the sleekness of the status-symbol machine of Apple under Steve Jobs. The innovation of the earliest Bitcoin users and the shape of the community that sought broader uses for it later. Think of the Winklevii — Perhaps not for too long.
The theory articulates a mostly positive view of technology as a font of creative potential and shows how integrating new machines also involves a degree of personal creativity, with individuals showing this spark standing to benefit later.
Canadian Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was another luminary of the new media era who rose to prominence around the same time as Rogers. McLuhan theorized that new technologies actually changed the way human cognition functions, leading to cascading aftereffects. In this manner the Gutenberg press ultimately framed modern western society, for without the press and movable typeset the emergence of such crucial layers as “individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism” might not have happened.
Though he died before the rise of the web, McLuhan is credited as having predicted it through his emphasis on exponential mass culture and coining of terms like “Global Village” and “Surfing”–the latter for “sustained, irregular” periods of tracing through large amounts of information. The principle that technology was amoral was part of his teaching, but McLuhan also believed that avoiding looking at the “Casualties” of new technology would lead to still greater disaster. After printing and books, the age of “electronic interdependence” would lead to another way of thinking, one which he compared paradoxically to pre-literate “Oral societies.” The idea of a physical library and its way of organizing would become obsolete. In addition, the sense of a fast-moving, “viral” crisis that often pervades the online world was captured by McLuhan. He foresaw the electronic/oral society as one wherein “everything affects everything all of the time.” This would in turn make a world prone to shared states of “terror”. (McLuhan [1963], ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, p.32)
Yet McLuhan was not a luddite. The point was to give proper consideration to new technology as it emerged and consider how its diffusion would affect our ways of thinking and our social order. Interconnection, he suggested, will mean more and more rapid cycles of collective sharing of information (largely a benefit) and collective crises. How exactly an Internet re-shaped by blockchain might reorganize our ways of thinking about ourselves remains unclear, but many skeptics point to the daunting features of preserving data in a ledger that can’t be altered, contradicting things such as the “Right to be Forgotten”, a part of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) now written into E.U. law.
Considering the volatility and creativity emerging in a torrent from the blockchain space, some might argue that anyone involved is still something of an innovator.
To return to Rogers, the diffusion theory implies that the value of joining a world changing technological shift early can come in many ways: as well as the rising value of a digital currency or asset there is the advantage of helping to shape a community, of becoming fluent in the effective use of a new invention and the possibility of influencing how the next generation of users will perceive it, which can raise one’s status and make one ready for related waves of change which may follow the first innovation.
By participating in Blockchain projects as a user or developer, you can show a conscious drive to engage with something new and potentially powerful.
Even if the dips and dives of the likes of Bitcoin become part of the past, another generation of blockchain projects and DApps is being launched and developed. The spark of the Innovator or the strategic cleverness of the Early Adopter are still available.
The launching of the Genaro Network’s Testnet and Mainnet this year will give you a chance to be one of those.
