How Type of Technology and Society Affect its Spread in the Society
In “How Tight-Knit and Individualistic Communities Adopt New Technologies,” Dr. Bryony Reich’s research regarding the adoption of technology through different network structures is described. Her research on this topic was inspired anecdotally by the adoption of WhatsApp among her friend group, where she wondered how well her tight-knit friend group adopted technology compared to other groups.
Reich found that technologies that were valuable no matter how many people adopted them were more likely to be adopted in individualistic societies, such as computers, while technologies that are more beneficial as more people use them are more likely to spread in cohesive communities. I found this article interesting because it listed sanitation systems as a technology that would be more useful when adopted by a large number of people, as health will improve the most if a large number of people switched to using a sewage system. The article also highlighted how technologies formed in an individualistic society was liable to spread first in a tight-knit society, talking about how fax machines were invented in the United States but were not widely adopted by businesses in the US until it was widely adopted in Japan, where the spread of fax machines happened a lot faster due to Japan being a more tight-knit society.
This article refers to technologies that can be adopted in individualistic societies as “low threshold technologies” while referring to technologies that spread faster in tight-knit societies as “high threshold technologies,” which relates to what we learned in class about the spread of a phenomena in a graph based off a threshold value that required a certain number of neighboring nodes to adopt a behavior before adopting it themselves. This article also added a depth by showing that type of phenomena that needed to be adopted affected how likely a network was to adopt that behavior. Reich also focused on the idea that individuals in a group could adopt technologies together at the same time, which was inspired by all of her friends agreeing to try WhatsApp at the same time after she introduced it to them. Adopting technologies simultaneously makes it easier for the technology to spread in a network, as we learned in class, and Reich was able to disprove the belief that it was harder to spread technology through tight-knit groups, as high threshold technologies tend to spread faster in tight-knit groups.
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-tight-knit-and-individualistic-communities-adopt-new-technologies-differently