A Theory of Crowds in Time and Space: Explaining the Cognitive Foundations of a New Market

Rumor Communities, Social Media, and Forthcoming Innovations: The Shaping of Technological Frames in Product Market Evolution

“…Social media platforms that host online product rumor communities provide a "free space" for individuals to purposely construct meaning around forthcoming innovations and meet their needs for synchronizing their understandings across time and space (Seong, 2017), and by expanding the timeline of this interaction to include the pre-history of products, we demonstrate the importance of these early moments in frame expansion and frame stabilization even before products are released to market.…”

“…Social media are defined as computer mediated platforms that allow communication that is visible to others and facilitates information sharing, user-created content, and collaboration (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017;McFarland & Ployhart, 2015). The affordances offered by social media mean that information can be exchanged in ways that compress time and space (Seong, 2017), allowing individuals to not only communicate across distances but also share experiences for which there is a permanent public record of the discourse over time. Social media have provided a new means of communication that is unprecedented in scale and speed (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017;McFarland & Ployhart, 2015).…”

“…McFarland and Ployhardt (2015) provide a broad review of how social media is distinctive from traditional media with a focus on these three domains, which is also echoed in other recent theoretical treatments of social media (e.g. Seong, 2017). First, when compared with traditional media, online social media platforms afford a much higher degree of interaction between individuals-which is based on wider access, more anonymity and interdependence.…”

“…Secondly, as also summarized in Table 1, social media provides a greater ability to aggregate past experience, as information is visible for long periods of time and the record is kept distributed across social media platforms. Finally, the speed at which collective sensemaking is updated as a product evolves is much higher on social media compared with traditional media (Seong, 2017).…”

“…While direct experience and media evaluations remain important in shaping technological frames, the emergence of social media provides a new arena for such activity. Social media, when compared with traditional media, is characterized by wide access, anonymity, immediacy, interdependence, and permanence on multiple platforms (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017;Seong, 2017;McFarland & Ployhart, 2015), and these characteristics make social media a prime candidate for the development and transmission of rumors (Oh, Agrawal, & Rao, 2013). Through social media, individuals can not only exchange news about products already introduced but also easily share product rumors and provide further propositions about forthcoming products.…”