TECHNOLOGY IS ABOUT MEDIA In April 2010, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported that “text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing fto-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group,” and noting that “half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month.” The ICMPA study noted a similar phenomenon – although the college students, close to 20 years old on average, were even greater senders of text messages, with a number of participants in the almost 200-person study reporting that they sent over 5,000 text messages a month, and one woman reporting that she sends over 9,000 a month. Both the Pew report and the ICMPA study document that teens and young adults today place an unprecedented priority on cultivating an almost minute-to-minute connection with friends and family. And the ICMPA study shows that much of that energy is going towards cultivating a digital relationship with people who could be met face-to-face – but oftentimes the digital relationship is the preferred form of contact:  it’s fast and it’s controllable. Two years ago, in 2008, Pew reported that the Internet had overtaken newspapers as the primary source of campaign news in the United States, and that, for the first time, younger Americans sought national and international news as much from online sources as they did from television news outlets. Today, University of Maryland undergraduates not only rarely mention television and newspapers when discussing their news consumption during Media Literacy classes; they show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. According to this study, students get their news and information in a disaggregated way, often through friends texting via cell phone, or Facebooking, emailing and IM-ing via their laptops.  Students are aware of different media platforms, but students have only a casual relationship to actual news outlets. In fact students rarely make