Communication Innovators or Laggards?. Diffusion of Innovations by U.S. Public Relations Practitioners

What will they think of next? Whatever the innovation, people will find a way to use it and abuse it. While interviewing Promod Haque at Norwest Venture Partners in Palo Alto, I was helped by the firm's public relations director, Katie Belding, who later sent me this e-mail: “I was chatting with my husband about your meeting with Promod the other day... He is a history teacher at a high school in San Mateo. I asked him, 'Where were you when the world went flat?' He said it just happened the other day at school when he was in a faculty meeting. A student was suspended for helping another student cheat on a test-we're not talking the traditional writing answers on the bottom of your shoe or passing a note, though...” Intrigued, I called her husband, Brian, and he picked up the story: “At the end of the period, when all of the tests were being passed up to the front of the classroom, this student very quickly and slyly pulled out his cell phone and somehow snapped a picture of some test questions, and instantly e-mailed it to his friend who was taking the same test the next period ...»