This chapter reviews classic theories of CMC that are relevant to understanding personal media use, including media richness theory, social presence theory, channel expansion theory, the hyperpersonal model, social information processing theory, channel complementary theory, and media multiplexity theory. The chapter also explores emergent and important perspectives, such as relationship interdependence and mundane mediated relationship maintenance. This chapter introduces the communicate bond belong (CBB) theory, which examines how the content of communication, particularly the episode of communication, influences the satiation of the fundamental need to belong. One advantage of CBB is its focus on human energy management, which stipulates that humans seek to conserve energy expenditure and invest their time and energy toward future belongingness need satiation. From the perspective of CBB theory, personal media use is understood as result of three forces: need satiation, energy conservation and investment, and homeostatic balance of social interaction and time alone.

This chapter argues that there are five enduring tensions in the use of media in relationships: hyper-coordination versus micro-coordination, personalized and purposeful messages versus generalized messages, contributing to the conversation versus virtual people watching, intentional attention versus incidental awareness, and routine access offline versus limited access offline. Each of these tensions describes how to conceptualize and understand the different ways of using personal media for social interaction and communication. These tensions are presented as dialectical tensions.

This chapter addresses the long-standing concern that new media technologies are displacing face-to-face conversations with close relational partners. Starting with the adoption of the telephone, the social displacement hypothesis has been a guiding perspective to understand new technology adoption. This chapter examines evidence of displacement in research on the internet and social media. This chapter also examines the evidence whether co-present media use, or using a smartphone while co-present with others, is problematic for relationship quality and conversational quality. It explores social normative explanations as well as relationship-specific outcomes in regard to co-present device use.

This chapter examines the social construction of technology (SCOT) perspective. This perspective examines how people shape technology use toward their own ends, and why deterministic models of media use fail to account for how people actually use technology. This chapter contrasts a relational approach from competing perspectives, especially technology-centered ones. Technological determinism and media domestication are examined. The SCOT perspective is brought into dialogue with constructivist theories of personal relationships and with dialectical and ironic perspectives on media’s influence on relationships. Three social factors influencing the use of technology are explored: norms of technology use, using technology to access important others, and make-do or seemfulness.

This chapter introduces the idea that relationships are a fundamental component of human nature, but there is a limit on the number of relationship partners humans can have and maintain. This chapter introduces the idea of the core network (or the two to five most important people in your life), the first fifteen (i.e., the primary members of your personal network), and two outer layers of relationship closeness. This chapter explains why social interactions are a valuable unit of analysis for studying relationships, and why both personal relationships and social interactions are important contexts for the study of mobile and social media. This chapter introduces a relationship-centered approach to understanding media and presents assumptions about why relationships are important and how media is in the service of those relationships.

The final chapter grapples with a critical question for the entire book: Has greater access to other people through media (connectivity) contributed to people’s sense of connection or furthered a sense of isolation? The current nearly constant state of connectivity is contrasted with the importance of connection through social interaction with close others. This chapter reviews evidence of declining rates of social interaction among Americans. Bringing back theories and perspectives introduced throughout this book, this chapter examines why connectivity does not necessarily make us feel more connected. Finally, the chapter offers suggestions for gaining the most from the promise of connectivity by establishing mediated social interaction routines.

This chapter introduces theories of the niche and media displacement to address the idea that although there is an ever-expanding array of personal media options, the displacement of one type of media for another is slow and gradual. This chapter starts by exploring text-based communication in the context of both interpersonal communication and classic CMC literature. The emergence of email and then-new phenomena such as chat rooms, message boards, and the listserv will be examined, followed by the emergence of SMS. This chapter also examines the rise of social media. Finally, this chapter documents the frequency of social interactions on various modes of communication, and concludes by focusing on the coexistence, rather than total displacement, of various communication options. The chapter finishes by suggesting a set of modalities that are likely to endure as technology changes.

This chapter explores the nature of modern multimodal relationships from a both/and rather than either/or perspective. It explores channel switching, which tracks the flow of communication through multiple media between relational partners. This chapter systematically reviews research that compares modalities to directly address the idea that face-to-face (FtF) communication has greater primacy as a mode of interaction. The chapter discusses the degree to which the privileging of FtF in contemporary and classic CMC research is appropriate and consistent with empirical evidence. This chapter summarizes the different uses of channels and the empirical evidence of differences between channels based on relationship outcomes, such as relatedness and loneliness. The chapter concludes with a review of layers of electronic intimacy, which demonstrates how modality map onto relationship closeness.

This chapter is about social networking sites and social media. Bracketing direct and private communication through other modalities (e.g., email, IM, chat/text), the remaining types of communication made possible through social media are examined. This chapter reviews mass-personal communication perspective on social media. This chapter offers three themes to understand social media use: social media as the social news, social media as the archive of self, and social media as bridging social capital. Social news is the idea that we use social media to advertise the events of our lives and read about the lives of others. The archive of self refers to both the searchability and permanence of our digital connections made possible with social media. Theories of social capital were among the first perspectives to develop during the rise of social media, and the value of social media for bridging social capital is examined in this chapter.

I considered dozens of ways to start this book and none seemed fitting. A technical introduction that reported billions of mobile connections or trillions of texts was tempting, but would be outdated before the book went to press. A personal anecdote about the ubiquity of social and mobile media in everyday life would be in the spirit of the book, but I figured no one who had not already noticed this on their own would need it described for them. I needed something else.

This chapter addresses the role of media in contributing to digital stress. This chapter suggests that there is weak evidence that social media is causally related to negative psychosocial outcomes, but there is consistent evidence of a small, negative association between psychosocial outcomes and social media use. The chapter suggests that the subjective experience of using social media, not use itself, may explain this negative relationship. This chapter introduces five types of digital stress: availability stress, approval anxiety, fear of missing out, connection overload, and cost of caring. This chapter explains why individuals experience digital stress and why they continue to engage in behaviors that contribute to digital stress.