Diffusion of Innovation & The Rise of Google Translate

 The Diffusion of Innovation Theory

In class, we learned about the Diffusion of Innovation Theory. This theory is credited to communication studies professor Everett M. Rogers. In 1962, Rogers showed how his theory can be used to explain the length of time it takes for an idea, product, or behavior to permeate a specific social group or society as a whole. When people start to accept the new innovation, the term "adopted" is used, and this adoption does not happen all at once. Rogers defined five adopter categories which come together to form a bell curve; the Innovators, the Early Adopters, the Early Majority, the Late Majority, and the Laggards. 

The Five Types of Adopters

The Innovators are those who want to be first. They are willing to take the risk of investing in  new things that they find interesting, and it often takes very little to catch the interest of these types of people. The next group, the Early Adopters, are those who are "opinion leaders" meaning they have influence over people. Not only are they open to change, but they recognize that change needs to happen. The Early Majority aren't exactly leaders, but they're quicker to adopt new things after seeing evidence that a new idea is relevant or a new product works. The last two groups are most reluctant to change. The Late Majority will only adopt the innovation after it has been tried out by the majority of the population. They're skeptical, but ultimately decide to adopt it in the end. The last group, the Laggards, are the people that are the hardest to convince to adopt anything drastically new. In reality, no innovation is ever fully adopted by 100% of the community. Those who chose not to, or can't, adopt the latest trend are included in the Laggards category.

Permeation

Because of these different groups of the population, an innovation permeates slowly at first then it quickly gains popularity. If you would like to learn more about the factors behind this theory and what causes people to adopt ideas at different rates, click here.

Comparing to Google Translate

In my previous blog post, "Communication Technology: Google Translate," I talked about the history of translation and the creation of Google Translate. In this blog post, I would like to analyze Google Translate's rise in popularity using the Diffusion of Innovation Theory. So, let's begin. 

When Google Translate launched in 2006, it was only available to use through computer web browsers, but in 2010 it was made available to mobile smartphone users. Therefore, smartphone owners and those with internet access were amongst the first to adopt the technology into their way of life. In 2010, smartphones weren't as widespread as they are today, and this correlates with a lower number of downloads of Google Translate's application. According to the Pew Researcher Center, in 2011, 83% of American adults owned a cellphone, but only 35% had a smartphone. Whereas now in 2021, 97% of adults own a cellphone and 85% are smartphone users. The number of smartphone and cellphone users has increased this way because of advancing technology (which makes devices cheaper and more accessible) and changing social norms (landline phones are no longer common and internet is considered by the majority as a "must have").

Ericsson. (June 2, 2021). Number of smartphone users from 2016 to 2021 (in billions) [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/ 

In November 2015, the mobile Google Translate app reached 300+ million downloads. At this point in time, 69% of American mobile phone users owned devices capable of running the application. In 2019, Google Translate reached 750+ million downloads, and 81% of mobile devices owned were smartphones. It is easy to see that as more people gained the technology needed for Google Translate more people utilized it. This leads me to think that the main reason people started to use Google Translate is because they were now able to do so. Now more people than ever have access as the global number of smartphone users has reached 6.378 billion in 2021. 

Hence, to categorize the users of Google Translate, I hypothesize the following:

• The Innovators of this innovation were the wealthy and tech savvy who could afford early smartphone models (mainly upper class individuals but perhaps some upper-middle class people as well).
• The Early Adopters were the family members and friends of the Innovators. They may have gained access to smartphones and Google Translate through the Innovators. 
• The Early Majority were members of the middle class who could now afford smartphone technology as time went on. 
• The Late Majority were members of the lower-middle and upper-lower classes who had to wait even longer than the Early Majority for the technology to become affordable to them.
• The Laggards are those who either don't, or can't, use smartphones or computers, so they don't have a way to access Google Translate.

In previous years, owning a smartphone was limited to a ver small portion of the population (the Innovators) because of the cost. There probably would have been more Google Translate users in 2011 if more could afford the luxury of a pocket-sized computer. I think that people wanted to use online translators (especially those who spoke a different language than the majority) but they didn't have the opportunity to.