POST EIGHT: DISNEY PLUS BELL DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS

 For my bell curve that represents the diffusion of innovations, I am going to track the progress of the streaming service, Disney Plus. 

 

STEP ONE: PIONEERS

Disney Plus started as an idea in summer of 2017, after Disney helped to produce ESPN+ and the Netflix Disney deal. Disney Plus was kept a secret between the developers during this time. Disney Plus was finally announced in September 2017. These people who knew about the streaming service and awaited its arrival before the actual release of the streaming platform were known as the pioneers.

STEP TWO: EARLY ADOPTERS

Disney Plus was officially released in the United States on November 12th, 2019. This was over two years of anticipation. The Early Adopters of the streaming service can be classified as people who followed the rise of media coverage of the service and created accounts on the first day. I was one of the Early Adopters of Disney Plus. These people were either interested in new content that was announced to stream on the site, or past content that was said to be on the site, as well. 

STEP THREE: EARLY MAJORITY

Within about two weeks of the Disney Plus launch, there were hundreds and thousands of articles on how much "nostalgia" the streaming service gave to so many different people. This ranged from older teens with shows like Wizards of Waverly Place and DCOMs to Middle aged and older adults who recognized the classic Disney movies and shorts from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and so on. This created a new wave of people searching for that "nostalgia" factor and thus, created the early majority. 

STEP FOUR: LATE ADOPTERS

After the wave of the "nostalgia craze," the streaming service did not slow down. This was when many parents and teens started to use Disney Plus on a regular day-to-day basis, not just for a fix of nostalgia. People began to start to rewatch tv shows, kids would get new content like endless episodes of mickey mouse clubhouse, and parents found their new favorite streaming service for clean and friendly kid media. 

STEP FIVE: LAGGARDS

While Disney Plus is now in the running for one of the most used streaming services on the market now, there are always going to be people who are not into the content it produces. Disney Plus has a smaller market with their actual content. For people who don't like Disney or Marvel or Pixar or Star Wars, there's nothing really on that streaming site for them to enjoy. Compare this to something like Netflix or Hulu that has more of a variety of the type of content and you get the laggards who will never purchase Disney Plus, no matter the hype.

POST SEVEN: YOUTUBE

In class on October 8th, my fellow classmate Nicolette gave a presentation about Youtube and how it has advanced as a technology. Youtube was created in 2005 by three former Paypal employees. Youtube became the breeding grounds for the newly created term, "viral videos." The plus for these videos were that they were easily accesible to people around the world, most of them were short (anywhere from about 5 seconds to 5 minutes long), and they were funny. The platform also allowed for people to share the links to the videos easily, creating the perfect formula for making videos go viral on the internet.

 

As Youtube progressed their growth as a platform, they saw a rise in Youtube creators who produced videos on a regular basis, whether that was weekly or in some cases daily, and that these creators were gaining fan bases and millions of subscribers. Youtube then developed a monetary system to pay their creators based on likes, subscribers, and views. This was an absolute game changer, because it set a precedent for people getting paid to be social media influencers. Some of the first big influencers included Zoella, Pewdiepie, Smosh, Joey Graceffa, and many, many more. Not only did it set precedents from a business perspective, but also from a social perspective. The Youtube community shaped many of the Gen Z teens and was one of the first social media platforms to have such an impact on an entire generation's actions and personalities. 

Extra info not included in the presentation came from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube

POST SIX: EMOTICONS AND EMOJIS

 For my each one, teach one technology, I chose emoticons and, later named, emojis.

A Brief History of Emoticons and Emojis

 Emoticons were discovered by Scott Fahlman in the year of 1982 on an online message board. He found that placing specific symbols in the desired orders of ":-)" and ":-(" could represent faces and indicate whether or not the post at hand was meant to be happy or sad. These two symbols soon expanded as people began to play around and experiment with the symbols, creating even more faces. This gave a Japanese artist the idea to design digital pictures that could be used on a special keyboard to exhibit faces, weather, items, and more. This first ever emoticon keyboard was created in 1999 and soon expanded and inspired many companies after that. In 2010, Unicode, which is the system that unifies encoding all across different platforms,  adopts emojis into their system. In 2011, Apple creates their first ever emoji keyboard. This was the beginning of the rise in what we recognize as the term "emoji" today. 

 

The Positives of Emoticons and Emojis

Emoticons were created to help the true message of a text or typed sentence be conveyed correctly. Using a happy face at the end of a text helps to prevent the recipient in taking that message in a sad context. Emoji and emoticons can also be used despite language barriers. This is extremely useful in online global communication. Emojis and emoticons are also very quick to use. With one tap you can say good luck by sending a thumbs up emoji, rather than clicking eight keys to create the word. Lastly, emojis and emoticons make a message more personal. This usually allows the recipient of the message to resonate with the message more. 

 

The Negatives of Emoticons and Emojis

Emojis and emoticons are often seen as unprofessional and are often described as "inappropriate for the workplace." The symbols can also be used to fake emotion to convince the recipient that you feel a certain way, rather than feeling something different. For example, sending a text saying "i'm fine :)" when you are feeling sad or depressed. Another huge issue is the fact that certain emojis have gained new meanings to them, rather than their original meanings. For example, the goat emoji is now often used to mean "the Greatest Of All Time (G.O.A.T)" instead of just a normal animal. Lastly, up until recent years, emojis have lacked diversity. Since emojis are not held back by a language barrier, they can be used by anyone. However, if you do not have an emoji that looks like you, then these emojis truly aren't as diverse as they seem. Recently, Apple has gotten better at this, releasing emojis of single parents, people with disabilities, different skin colors, and different representations of couples. 

POST FIVE: SPEECH THEORIES

The Eight Values of Free Expression work together as a unit to guarantee and ensure that our needs of free expression are met with grace and justice. In this blog post, I will discuss the importance and role of two of these values; individual self-fulfillment and promoting innovation and how these relate to the LGBTQ+ community. 

 

Individual Self-Fulfillment

The concept of individual self fulfillment promotes the idea of creating your own individual identity. This can be expressed through opinions, appearance, occupation, or anything regarding your individuality. This concept also focuses on the gratuity experienced from having the freedom to create your own identity and individuality in the world.  This type of value of free expression can be seen heavily within the LGBTQ+ community. This community's mission statement is "Empowering LGBT people, building strong community." The first value of free expression focuses on the first part of that sentence. Empowering the LGBTQ+ people to be themselves and create what they see as their own identity. For some this includes being gay, being lesbian, being bisexual, being transgender, being non-binary, being queer, and many, many more. All of these terms relate to "identities" that these people now are empowered to embrace and accept as their own.

Promoting Innovation

The concept of promoting innovation expresses the idea that the free speech that is out in the world is protected and used to create an innovative and new environment for the people who exhibited the speech. The LGBTQ+ community's mission statement is "Empowering LGBT people, building strong community." In this second part of the mission statement is where we see the concept of promoting innovation in play. This community is called a community for a reason. People who express their identifications will often find groups of friends who also identify as something in the LGBTQ+ community. The communities do multiple things to innovate and inspire including something as fun and light as pride festivals and parades, all the way to something more serious and important as fighting for the right for transgender men and women to be able to use the bathroom that they identify with. These actions are not just for the people themselves, but they are actions that the leaders of the community do for the people, so that they feel safe and protected. 

In conclusion, the LGBTQ+ community exhibits almost every single one of the eight values of free expression. However, I believe that the most important are individual self-fulfillment (empowering the LGBT people) and promoting innovation (building strong community). 

Quote from the Gay Center about the mission statement for the LGBTQ+ community:  https://gaycenter.org/about/