Move along

[aroraborealis]

In any social trend, there are phases and groups. There are the groundbreakers, the early adopters, the mainstream adopters, the sticks-in-the-mud. The average person probably spends most of his or her time in the middle groups, but probably also has areas of interest or disinterest that swing them into groundbreaking and sticking in the mud.

It's easy for me to see places where I'm a stick in the mud, but harder to see any where I'm a groundbreaker. Is this common? Do you see yourself as a groundbreaker about anything? If so, what? If almost-but-not-quite, what keeps you from it? What about stick-in-the-mud-ness? Is that easier or harder for you to see?

Comments

[maebeth.livejournal.com]

I lean heavily in the early adopter stage and am sometimes a groundbreaker. At least in some things. I actually expect that its when I'm being a stick in the mud that I can't tell.

For example, I'm probably the first among my friends to always wear a swimsuit in the hot tub. Also very quick to shun new foods. Just ahead of the crowd in a lot of ways.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

LOL

[catness.livejournal.com]

Okay, fine.

I'm a joiner, if it suits me. If the thing that Everybody's Doing is something I would have done anyway, I'll probably jump on the bandwagon, if I hadn't already done it before it became "the in thing".

The Joiner Activities I do:
- Music, because I can't help it, and because everyone in both sides of my family is a musician...
- Motorcycling, because I've been staring at motorcycles since I was a toddler and I just can't get over how cool they are...
- Tech, because no matter what job I have, I always wind up fixing stuff in addition to my actual duties...
- EMS, because I can't stand not being prepared...
- Photography, because I want to own everything I see, but where would I keep it...
- Sailing, 'cause the ocean is so sexy and it could kill me, so what's not to like...
- Camping, because it's the cheapest way to tour on a motorcycle...
- Racing, because I can go around and around on a track and improve myself every. single. lap...
- Martial arts, because I need something to quiet the monkey mind plus in secret I really want to be a super hero, but that's just dumb...
- Bicycling, because I can't do martial arts for exercise all the time, and I'm too much of a klutz to rollerblade...
- Reading science fiction, 'cause no other written word holds my attention long enough...
- Non-standard relationship models, because the typical ones in my society don't matter to me, negatively or positively...

Yeah, that about covers it. I can't think of anything I do that I do because it's part of a social trend, or its location in that trend. I honestly don't think I'm a groundbreaker about *any* of it, and I'm probably a stick-in-the-mud about almost everything. I just live my life.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

What she said, substituting the stuff I do for what she does.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

I sometimes make choices that are different than most of the people I know. It is hard to know while I'm making them whether they are ground-breaking (that is, in the future, more people will make the choice I'm making) or simply weird (my choice will continue to be unusual with respect to my peers). I think whether a choice qualifies as ground-breaking is only clear in retrospect.

Also, calling it ground-breaking to me implies that my choice actually affected other people's subsequent choices. If I do something that hardly anyone else ever does, and then more people start doing it but their choice to do so was not influenced by me, am I a ground-breaker?

I was a very, very early adopter of nipple piercing, the Java programming language, Reebok sneakers and web browsing. I have no idea whether to call my choices ground-breaking or not. It sounds awfully pompous! But no one else I knew was doing those things, and they all later became nearly ubiquitous.

I would say that I'm more often a stick-in-the-mud. That's always easy to see, because it doesn't require foresight! :-)

[dbang.livejournal.com]

I should add that when I am an early adopter/ground breaker, it is rarely because I anticipate that these things will become popular. I just like 'em.

I think Reebok sneakers are my classic example. I discovered them around 1982 and discovered they fit better than any sneaker I had ever worn. I was hooked. I saw them rise in popularity, and I kept wearing them. Then they became ubiquitous and I was still wearing them. Then they dropped out of fashion and I was still wearing them. Then you could hardly find anyone wearing them and I was still wearing them. Finally, the brand continued, but they labeled my particular type of them "Reebok Classics" and only sold them in off-price stores and I was still wearing them. Then they discontinued almost all the styles in the Classics line and I was still wearing them.

(I'd still be wearing them today if my chiropractor hadn't frowned on their lack of arch support.)

Thus the same choice starts ground breaking and ends stick in the mud! :-)

[maebeth.livejournal.com]

Hmph. I guess it depends on the circumstance. I think of myself as ground-breaking because when I look at something I think: how could we do it differentlly?

I'm an early adopter when someone ELSE says, why don't we do this differently and I say OK.

For sure, much (most) of the time we break ground on somethign that will never develop, and i'm adopting (early and often) something that won't turn out to be popular, or maybe even interesting.

the trait of the two categories is the willingness to get started on something BEFORE it is clear it will work.

A stick in the mud, in my view, is the person who STILL WON'T ADOPT the new idea even after it is clear that it DOES work, and even better than the old way.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

I supposed that's true.

On the other hand, your definition means only ONE person can be a ground-breaker. I think of it more like a bell curve of adoption: there aren't many people out at the tail ends, but there are probably more than 1.

Anyway, often my choices are made without any awareness of how it is "supposed" to be done, or how other people are doing it. This is especially true of clothes. I make my choices because of my own idiosyncratic requirements and preferences, not because I think "Oh, this is a better way!"

[veek.livejournal.com]

I... don't know. I just never pay much attention to this sort of thing, *both* the stick-in-the-mud and the groundbreaker extremes.

It really depends on the thing/activity in question, and the crowd in question. Compare me to my mom, and I'm way beyond groundbreaker on most everything. I'm an Extremely Early Adopter of most things technological, although lately markedly less so when it comes to Appleware (because it's just so much better to wait for v2.0, which will be better and cheaper). Hot new authors get put off until years after they became popular, unless it's sci-fi, but even in the latter case I'm behind the times compared to other SF fans. New restaurants I'd be at the forefront of exploring, except for those pesky finances.

And so on, heavily context-dependent.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

I'm doing ground-breaking research in my work. I can tell, because, like breaking new ground in skiing, it's a fuckload of work.

Socially, I have much more trouble telling. I'm clearly a stick-in-the-mud on cell phone use! And clothing fashions more generally. As dbang says, plenty of the things I do are unusual, but unlikely to really take off. I'm hoping that I'm an early adopter on a lot of eco-choices, because if they don't become widely popular, life will suck relatively soon.

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I think I'm generally a stick-in-the-mud: change, after all, is bad! :)

I can think of places where I think of myself as being innovative, but I'm not sure about ground-breaking: as dbang said, that implies to me that my choice will turn out to be important for other people, and I'm not sure I have the perspective to tell. Most of the places where I feel sure that I'm doing something important are also places where other people are doing it (that's part of how I know it's important), which makes it easier, I think, to tell what you're doing in cases of being an early adopter.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I think I'm a stick-in-the-mud in most areas of my life, compared to most of my friends.

I am an island; O K maybe just a peninsula.

[sarahshevett.livejournal.com]

I think "ground breaking" pretty much means that I don't have a "social group" and that's the way it's always been for me.
I've always been outside of the mainstream and therefore had my share of ostracization and torment.
As a child I was always the target in my neighborhood and at school as I dressed and acted differently. Strangely, all I wanted was to be able to conform, but I never ever could.

And I am not sure that I'd call my own personal trends "ground breaking" as that is not the intent. It's just me.
I do what I want. I come up with my own ideas since I don't really have a "social circle" to draw from and I never really have. That's pretty much the loner lifestyle.
Many things I have done or developed have become major huge trands. If I could only figure out a way to make money with this.

Unfortunately when you are the "first" to do something, it usually isn't embraced, its reviled. Until that 100th monkey discovers it.
By then I am usually on to something else by years.

Example: I wondered ( in 1977) if I could pierce the top of my ear. I had never seen anyone with a pierced top of their ear. So I did it.
I did it myself.

Goat cheese in America 20 years ago? forget it.

I invented a haircut in 1980 that was totally ridiculed. I liked the way it kept the hair out of my face yet I still had long hair to play with. Kind of like a built in headband, I made the line from ear to ear across the top of my head.
Now it's known as the Fe-mullet.

[wolfkitn.livejournal.com]

hmmm... it's possible that im getting a bit lost in the definitions, but... i think that if i'm doing something that is right for *me* then it's not so much a matter of the term that someone else might apply to it. when i've done what has come down to jumping on bandwagons of things that were right for me, it has worked out well, and my expressions of joy in the activity that was new to me has at times infectious to others around me who hadn't heard of that thing (e.g. folkdancing, which has been in new england and in the world for a few hundred years, but only became meaningful to me in an enduring way in 1994; i think this was early as compared to some now-peers who started dancing after me, but some of my now-dance-friends were dancing when they were teens, well before i was born). at other times i've tried to follow a trend that wasn't right for me, and i probably ended up hanging out in it for too long for my, or anyone else's sake before figuring that out. or maybe i'm misunderstanding the question?

[vinnie-tesla.livejournal.com]

I constantly feel like I need to diligently study the people around me so as to fit in enough that I don't find a crowd of people marching up to my door with pitchforks and torches tonight. Intellectually, I realize that this is (usually) totally erroneous, but it seems to be very deep-set.