Seth Godin, a popular internet blogger and author of 18 books, recently posted about a diagram called Idea Progression. Although this concept isn’t something we’ve discussed in class before, I think it’s very interesting and relevant to what we study in Comm. 101. For those that aren’t familiar with the diagram, I’ve attached a copy below.
The Idea Progression Diagram illustrates what Godin refers to as how idea adoption works. It describes the process required for an idea to go from being just an idea to being a universal concept. The process starts when an idea is in the “fringe” stage – when it is just a thought that a few people are interested in, known as the “risk seekers”. At this point the idea is seen as foreign and not generally accepted, so the people working on the idea are attempting to make the idea more popular. It gradually becomes more and more accepted until eventually it reaches the “always” stage, when it becomes a concept that is seen as normal and believed to have always existed.
I find this concept interesting because of how relevant I think it is to our daily lives. There have been so many inventions and fads that have shown up over the past decade that start out small but eventually become a thing of the mass. An invention like Facebook, that originally was not seen as very significant has since blown up and acquired millions of users. The key to success is to try and determine which ideas will flourish and which are destined to fail.
Sources:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/09/how-idea-adoption-works-the-idea-progression.html