Adoption and use issues of new technologies

Bradner, Kellogg and Erickson's study of the adoption of the "Babble" system illustrates again how local cultures together with technological characteristics can impact the adoption and use of technologies. They also proposes a number of notions and frameworks to understand the adoption phenomenon, such as critical mass (they pointed out that not just the absolute number of participants are important, but also different types of participants for different types of communicative practices - while announcement practice requires a large audience, "good morning" greeting might only need two people), social affordance (whether the interaction between local culture and techological characteristics and afford certain types of practices), and ecology. They illustrate that in the shared culture, people can easily infer about what is going on with the small social cues in the babble systems.