Diffusion and Cascades: The Vaping Epidemic
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023954/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4630093/
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/28/the-diffusion-of-juul-among-teens/
The use of electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes meant to have similar nicotine effects as a real cigarette, has exploded in popularity in recent years. Many young adults have fallen into the trap of vaping for reasons such as the renormalization of smoking amongst their peers and the marketing strategies, such as different e-cigarette flavors, used by these e-cigarette companies to appeal to young adults. In order to stress its popularity, the article “The Vaping Epidemic in Adolescents” shows how a study reported that between the year 2017 and 2018 there was a 10 percent increase (1.3 million teenagers) in the act of vaping with e-cigarettes amongst adolescents. I have no doubt in my mind that those numbers have increased exponentially since 2017. This vaping epidemic is a prominent and rather dangerous issue because vaping is diffusing through networks and has potential to cause complete cascades amongst certain networks.
Using our knowledge from INFO 2040: Networks, we can understand how the use of different types of e-cigarettes is spreading like wildfire amongst adolescents around the globe. Diffusion of innovations is the study of how new ideas or technologies through innovation diffuse through the links of networks and spread onto other nodes and potentially other networks or clusters. Through this process, new technologies, such as different vape devices, are able to get noticed and continue to grow by some individuals of a certain network beginning to use it. These individuals are called initial adopters of a certain technology. Once they adopt a certain technology and they have enough influence, their friends will begin to use it (local population) and it may begin to start carving out a new network. From this, cascades usually begin as close individuals of the initial adopters are unsure of a decision to make and try to observe others behaviors in an attempt to be similar, or fit in.
For example, in my home city of Miami a popular e-cigarette device used by my peers is called a HDQ Cuvie. There are an assortment of flavors which appeal to my many peers. This specific e-cigarette is only really used in my home city, but nowhere else. We can view all adolescent vapers in Miami as one cluster of nodes. There was a strong and influential number of initial adopters of the Cuvie which is why it is now used by most if not all adolescent vapers in Miami. The use of this device has been steady for the past year and a half. This is because the cluster of adolescent vapers in Miami is so dense that it causes there to be a high value of threshold q. This value of “q” means that any node will adopt the new technology if at least q of its neighbors are using it. So, if a new type of vape were to be released it would be difficult for it to spread across nodes in the Miami cluster unless there are extremely strong initial adopters that can allow for the surpass of this threshold “q”. If this is possible, then a cascade of this new technology (Cuvie) will most likely occur in this cluster.
Now, let’s assume that in other places adolescents use a certain type of vape that is popular amongst their friends as well. Once again creating yet another cluster of adolescent vapers in a certain city, X. Let’s assume that this cluster of nodes is also dense, so it would be difficult for a new technology to take over this cluster. Let’s say that in this city X, there are a tiny number of nodes who share a link with nodes in the Miami cluster, hence, creating a larger network. However, this amount of links is not enough for the Cuvies (used by the Miami cluster) to spread onto the cluster in city X. This is because the new technology of a Cuvie has reached a natural boundary in the network and cannot go any further. The city X cluster is r-dense meaning that each node in this cluster has more than r-fraction of his/her neighbors inside this city X cluster. If this city X cluster is a (1-q)-dense cluster, and no one inside has adopted the Cuvie, then the diffusion with threshold q will not enter the city X cluster.
So, this might describe why there is variability in the type of vaping device used based on location, but we know that the adolescent vaping issue as a whole can be related to the topic of diffusion and cascades in Networks as well. As stated before, diffusion of innovations explains how the issue of vaping got noticed by adolescents and continues to grow by some initial adopters of a certain technology influencing adolescents into vaping. Adolescents begin to show cascade behaviors and adopt this new technology of vaping in an attempt to fit in with their friends. This along with the dangers of vaping is a reasonable explanation as to why this explosion of popularity of vaping amongst adolescents is coined the Vaping Epidemic.