I started out as a student of engineering in my undergraduate years, and while my engineering school happened during the mornings, I was a journalist at night. I was in the newspaper offices taking assignments, going out and reporting and bringing back stories to print. In those days, my interests around media and journalism crystallized into an interest in audiences, and how they might be perceiving what we put out in our newspapers. Ultimately, I've always been really interested in how people process mediated communications. While the focus of much of my current work, is communication technology, my ultimate goal in this work has always been to discover how aspects of technology affect the way people perceive content conveyed via those technologies. For example, I studied the effects of interactive media or interactivity, a concept that you and I have worked on quite a bit. The dependent variables of some of this research is always about how people perceive that content, how that content shapes their worldview. A lot of my work has also been in the area of human-computer interaction. But that area, which is called HCI, is really a means to an end., and the end is really that I'm focused on is effectiveness of communication. Likewise, another area of interest for me, and in fact, my minor in my doctoral studies is psychology, which helps us understand the human mind. But in my work, it is again, a means to an end. To better understand how user psychology intersects with technology to affect communication. Ultimately, it's all about how people are affected by communication technology, and how it affects the nature of their communications, therefore; it's an obvious choice for me to be in this field, and no other field.