It took 11 years for social media to reach 7 in 10 Americans, at a time when the average lifespan of those alive when it was introduced exceeded 77 years. So social media took 14 per cent of a lifespan to achieve saturation. The comparative metric for electricity was 62 per cent of the average lifespan. Benchmarked against average lifespan at time of introduction, smartphones diffused 12.5 times faster than the original telephone.
