Diffusion of innovation in mobile phone activism and social movements

¶ … life stories in it in forming one's own DNP project.

Diffusion can be described as the procedure through which an innovation is conveyed via particular channels over time amidst members of a social system. An innovation, on the other hand, can be described as a practice, idea, or even object regarded as new by somebody or adoption unit (Rogers, et.al). The process of diffusion basically entails both interpersonal communication and mass media channels. In the current world, information technologies like mobile phones and the internet are a representation of remarkable diffusion tools. Think of the following encounter of co-author Singhal in the Philippines.

In May 2006, as Singhal walked down Epifanio de los Santas Avenue (known as "Edsa") in Manila, Philippines, a Filipina associate noticed that "Edsa" was actually the street where cell phones brought down President Estrada's government. Taking in the bewildering look on Singhal's face, she explained that five years back she received a text message on her cell phone. The text message read 'Go 2 EDSA' and just within a span of few hours, EDSA was swarming with thousands of Filipinos who had also received a similar message (Rogers, et.al). The Filipinos were protesting against the corrupt Estrada government. The crowd grew to more than one million just within a few days. Estrada was overthrown. Upon his return to the United States, Singhal's internet search showed that in January 2001, the impeachment trial against Estrada was stopped by senators that backed him up. Just within minutes of utilizing cell phones to relay a text message led to the fall of the government without even a single shot being fired. The rapid diffusion of a mere text message led the military to actually withdraw its support.

After reading the story on the internet, Singhal then forwarded it to twenty-eight undergraduate students in his Communication and Information Diffusion class at Ohio University through email, requesting them to share the story with friends and family members that were interested. Most did so. Here, we get to see how an innocent interpersonal exchange on a street in Manila was itself diffused from one source to several recipients and, in turn, to other individuals through rapid diffusion (Rogers, et.al).

The study of the diffusion of innovations in its present-day form could be tracked down from the premises and observations of a French sociologist as well as legal academic, known as Gabriel Tarde. Major concepts of diffusion like the S-curve diffusion, opinion leadership, and the function of socioeconomic position within interpersonal dispersion were instigated by Tarde, even though he didn't actually apply these concepts with these terms. These particular theoretical concepts had been described by Tarde in his book, The Laws of Imitation. The academic leads proposed by Tarde were then followed up by anthropologists that started examining the position of technological innovations in causing cultural change. Descriptive of these anthropological researches had been Clark Wissler's study of the horse's diffusion amid the Plains Indians (Rogers, et.al). Just like in other anthropological works, stress was on innovation outcome. For instance, Wissler illustrated that including horses in their culture drove the Plains Indians, who had been living peacefully, into a state of nearly constant war with the surrounding tribes.

DNP Project Idea

With respect to technology in healthcare today, reinvention is considered as a step for diffusing what is called flexible technology into a very intricate social surrounding (Cain and Mittman, 2002). Currently, most hospitals would say that that their administrative systems are unique. They, however, carry on with designs that are all similar to one another. Customization is actually what increases the acceptance of technology.

Method to Use

The technique I want to apply for this study is the one observed in the Iowa Hybrid Seed Corn Study; majority of investigators have actually followed the methodological path described by Gross and Ryan in the study of hybrid corn. Information is primarily collected by individual or telephone interviews from participants that are asked to retrospect regarding their period of adoption, the communication sources or paths that they utilized in the innovation-decision process, to describe their network links with others, as well as other variables like their personal and social traits (Rogers, et.al). The person is normally the analysis unit, though in the current years, several researches have been carried out whereby an organization is the analysis unit. Insufficient academic data has been provided to the outcomes of technological innovations. The main style of diffusion investigations is therefore the quantitative analysis of information collected through survey interview methods from huge samples. The general impacts of these major techniques of research have been to stress an understanding of the diffusion process as the result of individual actions and choices.

Results

It is quite true that both Google and Microsoft did not succeed in their initial efforts of deploying Personal Health Record (PHR) solutions. Apple is now taking its turn with Health and its related HealthKit. We ought to pay attention, but just like Google and Microsoft before them, the success of Apple could be restricted without a clean way of connecting the client and caregiver. PHR solutions ought to become the only source of truth in a manner that generates a complete PHR so as to truly take hold (Thrower, 2014). We actually require a system that is comparable to our national credit report system. This is perhaps beyond the realm of possibilities, however, with the dominance of PaaS and SaaS, why not take an extra step and deliver constituent parts as a service? With the assumption that an ESB framework exists in healthcare, what if we could simply collect the required functions in a set of solutions out of the cloud? Instead of several months being spent by solution architects attempting to discover how to make dissimilar applications work jointly across several platforms of technology, they would instead collect and examine light-weight constituent parts to create solutions for what is actually needed in their organization at that particular moment. If we dislike the manner through which a certain function operates or we adjust our way of working, then we simply discard that part and look for the correct part. Instead of medical doctors having to get to know how to utilize several user interfaces, they would utilize their favorite device in interacting with several host solutions. Our alleged HER solutions would get reduced to become clinical data repositories with intricate plumbing (Thrower, 2014).

Whereas conventional healthcare payers have a lot of interest in higher analytics for financial modeling as well as risk reduction, they have minimal interest in improving technology to streamline payment procedure (Thrower, 2014). These payers have conventionally acquired majority of their profits through the administering of self-funded health plans. Simply put, they are making a lot of profit to simply transfer funds from healthcare sponsors to healthcare providers. Banks have already proved that they actually transfer money more efficiently and effectively when compared to healthcare payers. Provided the correct disruptive activators, I am certain that they would embrace the opportunity to develop a new system for healthcare refund for the promise of minimized cost and high-volume operation fees in the coming future. In spite of the intricacy levels in healthcare, which far surpass the intricacy in other industries, the technology devices exist to gather the essential data and automate these procedures. Doing this would most probably eradicate approximately $500B in administrative waste in our present system or perhaps even more.

Conclusion

Diffusion of innovations research promises to improve our comprehension of how social change actually takes place, which is an important subject for all academics of society (Rogers, et.al). What is technology's function in the production of social change? Academic interests in new technologies of communication by students of communication have provided special support in diffusion research in the current years. There is actually no cause to anticipate that the academic popularity of diffusion research by communication intellectuals shall reduce in the predictable future. Innovations continue to be studied and created.

We, however, do not require more of the same diffusion research. Additional academic attention ought to be paid to the outcomes of technological innovations (Rogers, et.al). Other methods of collecting information are thorough interviews, ethnography, and participant monitoring should replace the main quantitative techniques of gathering data as well as data analysis. Diffusion of innovations practice should recognize and value the function of local wisdom and solutions as well. The innovations which are locally produced are not only more culturally-suitable, but also more likely to be embraced by the probable adopters. Other techniques of collecting data have been less used, even as ways of enhancing the main approach of survey data collection together with quantitative techniques of analyzing data have been adopted.