Each day, the average American watches over five hours of television (Nielsen, 2010a),
and spends almost one and a half hours viewing Web pages (Nielsen, 2010b). Social networking
has become the most popular online activity, with Facebook claiming more than
500 million users (Wortham, 2010) and Twitter claiming 105 million users (Chacksfield,
2010). The trend continues even when the connection is wireless, with the average teen
sending or receiving a staggering 3,705 text messages per month (Nielsen, 2010c). It is
clear that, as Lundby (2009) recently wrote, traditional media, new media, and mobile
media are “everywhere, all embracing,” (p. 2) or as Duran, Yousman, Walsh, and Longshore
(2008) suggested, “ubiquitous and unavoidable in the modern world” (p. 52).