Masaryk University

Masaryk University Faculty of Social Science Diffusion of Social Media in East Asia How sociocultural context influenced the diffusion of social media innovation in South Korea, Japan, and Mainland China? Bachelor thesis Michal Španěl Brno 2018 1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ……………………………. Brno, 1. 12. 2018 2 Abstract This work is dedicated to a comprehensive analysis of sociocultural context influencing a diffusion of innovations. Diffusion of innovation and related theory is applied to a specific case of spread of social media in East Asia countries, all having and developing unique and distinctive media ecosystems: Japan, South Korea and Mainland China. The thesis aims to analyse how might have sociocultural factors influenced the diffusion of the media innovation in these countries and in which direction, based on the related innovation and media theory. Key words: diffusion of innovation, Carl Rogers, Bass Diffusion Model, Hofsfede cultural dimensions, Hall low-context high-context dimensions, innovativeness, social media, Mainland China, South Korea, Japan 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 5 2. Everett Rogers and innovations .......................................................................................... 7 3. Bass Model and Critical Mass .......................................................................................... 11 4. Cultural Dimensions and Innovativeness ......................................................................... 12 5. Characteristic of Innovators .............................................................................................. 20 6. Critical Mass ..................................................................................................................... 28 7. Learning effect .................................................................................................................. 29 8. Diffusion of Social Media in Japan .................................................................................. 31 9. Diffusion of Social Media in South Korea ....................................................................... 42 10. Diffusion of social media in Mainland China .................................................................. 52 11. Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 58 12. Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 60 13. Limits ................................................................................................................................ 62 14. References ........................................................................................................................ 63 Number of words: 14 398 4 1. Introduction Diffusion research is conducted a long time, ranging from analysis of innovations itself to characteristic of recipients, merging these dimensions together. This work aims to not mix them together, it focuses strictly on society and culture and how it influences diffusion of innovations. Iuse scientifical theoretical findings and apply them to Social media in East Asia. But why social media and why East Asia? Social media are quite new phenomena arising in 21th century, when many new successful media platforms (LINE, Kakao, WeChat, Weibo) were created and started to be successful in last years. Data from new platform should be added to data from older platforms (Cyworld, Mixi, Myspace) to have wider options to generalize. Till now only limited research was done on social media in connection with diffusion of innovations opening opportunity to do it now. The East Asian region was chosen mainly because development of social media here is unique and localised. Today´s world´s social media landscape is mainly dominated by western social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter). In East Asia region (Japan, South Korea, China) is situation different. These states resist to the westernalization pressure with their own platforms being widely used in their own countries expressing their cultural specifics (as I will later show). Western social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are on the other side widely globalized and global appeal is imprinted in their development. Facebook is not built for American market, Indian market, Japanese market, it is built for everybody (with some very limited local customizations). Western social media platforms could be from cultural perspective analysed harder as those platforms does not take these stronger to account and were not built with them in mind.East Asian social media platforms are cultural specifics easier to see. The fact that every of observed countries has its own very different social media market enables me to compare them well. 5 My method of work is qualitative research, specifically literature review with an application of acquired knowledge on specific cases of three social media landscapes of South Korea, Japan and Mainland China. My research question thus is: How sociocultural context influenced a diffusion of social media innovation in South Korea, Japan and Mainland China? I have chosen to make detailed literature review first, going through of few hundreds of studies related to culture, societal characteristic and innovativeness, using main existing study databases, going through references inside studies linking to other materials, reading relevant chapters of main related authors in diffusion of innovation and cultural theme (Rogers, Bass, Hofstede, Hall). The second step was going through relevant resources connected with the development of social media in target countries, using digital Blogs and Newspapers mainly from English-speaking media landscape and some standards studies too (as social media is quite new topic, only very limited amount of studies in English was dealing with it). The text was written for every country with information mainly focused on specific of development of target markets and platform and cultural and societal specifics of target markets, eventually of platforms. The third step was using the checklist of chapters used in every subchapter of literature research and searching in the text all relevant information. After a comparison of it and consideration, writing mine conclusions and discussion based on scientific finding which very observed by researchers mentioned in the work. 6 THEORETICAL PART: 2. Everett Rogers and innovations 2.1 Roger´s Diffusion of Innovation Theory In this chapter I summarize main theory connected with innovativeness and sociocultural factors. Main theoretical concepts in this topic are: Rogers Diffusion of innovations theory and Bass diffusion model, Hofstede´s cultural dimensions and its correlates, correlates of other factors and learning effect. I go through all these factors one by one. Innovativeness of individuals could be defined as personality trait (Foxall, 1995), innate innovativeness “a predisposition to buy new and different products and brands rather than remain with previous choices and consumer patterns’ (Steenkamp et al., 1999), consumer innovativeness, the tendency to buy new products more often and more quickly than other people (Midgley and Dowling, 1978). Or a characteristic of the system, a characteristic based on relative position in time among potential adopters the social system. “Innovativeness is the degree to which an individual or other unit of adoption is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than other members of a system” (Rogers, 2003, p. 22). The fist conceptualizations are then more stable, the second actualized. (Hirshman, 1980) The line between definition is often very thin and authors often in their works manipulate like there was definition only one (Rogers, 2003), mainly when they search relationships between and other factors and concepts. In this work, we either use innovativeness defined from the perspective of asystem either from the perspective of an individual, as the way how to note all important relationships. In text are these differences in definitions not stated, they are however used in limits of work at the end of the text. Rogers diffusion of innovation concepts represents way how to explain how 7 innovations spread in society from the earliest time of its adoption in social system to the moment where saturation of market happens. Using the adoption rate and time as main metrics. Two typical cases of diffusion curve are sigmoid (see Figure 1) and exponential when sigmoid is the most common one and exponential is less typical. (Eliashberg, Tapiero, & Wind 1987; Gatington & Robertson, 1985) In theory of Rogers (2003) diffusion rates are usually at the beginning lower reaching less conservative member of a social system first and continue to the general public. When after the accumulation of critical mass rise usually start to be steep which creates S-Shape of the curve. Rogers works in this context with phenomena’s of homophily and heterophily, which together with later introduced Bass effects of innovation and imitation help explain typical main processes behind diffusion. Figure 1. S-shaped graph of innovation diffusion development as suggested by Rogers (2003). Graph from Nathan (2014, April 23). Dangerous S-Curves

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