Author ORCID Identifier
Viswanath Venkatesh: 0000-0001-8473-376X
Abstract
At the outset, although I officially pronounce the original technology acceptance model (TAM) dead—which is something I tried about 20 years back in 2007, it has continued to haunt academic journals as a citation-hungry zombie. This paper introduces the Tesla acceptance model (TAM), a born-again model, rising from the ashes, to extract novelty from the saturated technology adoption literature, especially using TAM. To address a critical gap of technology adoption among users in the new era of continuously updating software-defined technological systems, a new TAM that abandons parsimony for a set of rich arbitrarily developed, potentially overlapping constructs and associated memorable acronyms , including FRED (feature reinterpretation and expectation drift), SUE-B (software update excitement - beta), JAMES (justification and affect maintenance of enduring support), VENKI (variable elasticity in normative knowledge interpretation), and the mediator of COOL (congruence of observed lifestyle), are introduced. The new TAM’s constructs, which are rooted in an ad hoc set of theories and, more importantly, the author’s (i.e., my) whims, successfully engulf the old TAM. The new TAM was tested using data collected from 1,024 postprandial delusional owners of the fictitious Tesla Model XYZABC in India who provided verified bloodwork to prove they were sufficiently satiated. Results indicated an absurdly high 87% variance explained in behavioral intention to use the technology (i.e., Tesla Model XYZABC), primarily because users with high VENKI can interpret any failure as a success to avoid cognitive dissonance. By demonstrating that identity alignment (COOL) is more important than actual functionality, the new TAM serves as a framework to manipulate users deftly. I conclude by urging the community to replicate this model ad nauseam in ever-more-never-before-studied contexts—such as preprandial iPhone 71 MegaMax Ultra adoption in Wakanda—to ensure the TAM, albeit the new TAM, gravy train rolls on for another forty years.
Recommended Citation
Venkatesh, V. (In press). ‘Rising from the Ashes’, the New TAM for the Next 40 Years: A Satirical Parody. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 59, pp-pp. Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol59/iss1/5
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