The average person in Canada spends about 230 minutes per day watching TV and 200 minutes per day on the Internet. That's about 325 eight-hour days, a full-time job! We spend another 70 minutes per day with other media, including newspapers, magazines, and traditional radio. That's more than 3,000 hours per year of media use, more time than we spend on anything else, including working or sleeping. This consumption of information sustains our economy, and most of the economic activity in North America now involves producing, processing or distributing information including the output of the mass media, Internet, telecommunications and computer industries. The goal of this course is to prepare students to thrive in today's increasingly integrated communications and information environment.