This suggests that the adoption and use of digital technologies
follows social trends, where one medium becomes
popular among users and reaches a peak of high penetration,
and then daily use becomes steady, or even diminishes, as other
media start gaining popularity. For example, instant messaging
(IM) use decreased as users relied more heavily on SNSs for
communication. This occurred without SNSs completely
replacing IM but, rather, with IM slowly becoming of secondary
relevance for communication.
What these two trends suggest is that each form of social
media has its own biases in terms of the kinds of communication
it facilitates and the social consequences and rewards
it has for users (Innis, 1951; McLuhan, 1964; McLuhan &
Powers, 1989). It also suggests that users do not completely
replace one form of social media with another because each
form supports unique communication needs that the other
cannot completely fulfill.