Do you remember all the commercials you saw last night? Did you read every status update that every one of your friends posted on Facebook? As we discussed in Chapter 6, we make specific choices about which messages we will select and attend to. This selectivity means that audiences are not passive sponges that absorb everything media throw at them. Rather, many communication scholars argue that audiences, even children, are instead active cognitive processors of information (Huston, Bickham, Lee, & Wright, 2007). Being active does not mean, however, that we critically evaluate the messages we see (although we can certainly do that); it means that we look for cues that tell us whether something on TV (or in other media) is interesting, relevant, or otherwise worth noticing (Valkenburg & Vroone, 2004). It also refers to the idea that different people have different reactions and interpretations of media messages (Morley, 2006). The concepts of selectivity and an active audience suggest that media effects are much more limited than we might otherwise believe.