Diffusion of Information and Innovation
James W. Dearing, Do Kyun Kim · The International Encyclopedia of Communication · 2013
Diffusion is a multifaceted perspective about social change in which people, innovations, and the media environment affect how rapidly change occurs. Scholars dating back at least to the German social philosopher Georg Simmel and the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde theorized about imitative behavior at the level of small groups and within communities, and the relation between these micro‐level processes to macro‐level social change. In the 100 years since, researchers have tended to conceptualize diffusion either at the macro sociological level of sector, system, national, or state change (Dearing et al. 2006), the social psychological or communicative level of local relationships and how those linkages affect adoption patterns as in the classic studies by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) and by Rogers and Kincaid (1981), or the psychological level of how individuals perceive innovations in the form of a codified set of pros and cons (Manning et al. 1995). Beginning in the 1960s, diffusion concepts have been operationalized and used to purposively spread pro‐social innovations through → development communication in Colombia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, India, Finland, Korea, Tanzania, Bolivia, and Vietnam (see, e.g., Puska et al. 1986). Diffusion research has been conducted in single countries, comparatively across countries, and by tracing innovations across countries (Greenhalgh et al. 2004).