ABSTRACT
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), a group of sailors lost at sea complain that there is “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink” (Coleridge 2006). In the current media environment, audiences can hardly complain about the availability and accessibility of media content, at least in quantitative terms. Nor could the media complain about the size of their combined audiences. Audiences are everywhere, as recipients and increasingly as senders of information. Researchers who try to account for the relationship between media and audiences, in turn, have access to growing masses of evidence. Data are everywhere, even if research may still be struggling to make sense of them.
