Everett Rogers
1931–2004 — diffusion of innovations and adopter categories
Communication scholar who systematised how innovations spread and who adopts when — innovator through laggard.
Everett Rogers (1931–2004) was an American communication theorist. His Diffusion of Innovations is the standard reference for how new ideas spread through social systems and for adopter categories — innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, laggard.
What we cite
- Role vocabulary echoed in the Genesis vignette The Innovation Divide — with the explicit distinction that our vignette is not Rogers’s diffusion curve but same-evidence tier disagreement.
- Lifecycle context for Geoffrey Moore’s chasm model.
- Homophily and heterophobia — Rogers’s account of why communication clusters among similar people, producing the diffusion S-curve; we reuse the pair as analytical lenses for failure modes when truth is buried, correct minorities are dismissed, Cassandras are ignored, or dissent is persecuted (witch hunts, heresy trials, organisational retaliation).
Corpus stance
Context — Rogers for adoption language and for social-structure diagnosis of epistemic failure. Homophily explains passive burial; heterophobia explains active punishment of unlike bearers. Tier and commitment remain our primary honesty tools — these concepts explain why honest tier often never reaches the boundary, not substitutes for recording it.