Larry D. Lauer

This is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Those of us alive at the time are once again recalling where we were when we heard the news.

I was sitting in a communication class at American University in Washington, DC. The door opened and a person stood there stunned, and then managed to simply say, “the president has been shot!” My classmates and I sat motionless in total silence.  No one, not even our professor, said a word. In a few minutes, one by one we stood up and passed quietly from the room. I walked solemnly out into the fall morning and wandered aimlessly around the campus bewildered about what might be the future of our country, and frightened about what unknown course my life could now take.

In an instant, the world had changed.  Internal unrest and racial divide would eventually shake up our society. The Vietnam war would continue to divide us. And admiring perceptions of this United States of America around the world would never be the same again. The now dominant  medium of television would seize the moment and literally come into its’ own during the next four days. The entire world was glued to a screen, and the power of imagery was inescapably experienced by all of us… all “live” on television in “real time!”

From the very beginning, those of us studying television were asking the question: “Will television eventually bring about a global village of common understanding, or will it magnify our differences?” The Kennedy assassination managed to muddy the waters. In some ways we were one community, and in other ways we were driven apart. In the final analysis, the lesson learned was that the age of imagery, and eventually the age of digital interactive media, was making things far more complex, bewildering, and potentially explosive, than ever before.

Television was enhancing our emotional experience of critical events. I know from trying to produce programs myself, that television “liked” conveying feelings and drama and did not like details. The more emotion, the more the public became glued to the screen. The more information and details, the more likely the public would tune away. What was happening before our very eyes, was the realization that the addictive power of television could be making the world more emotional, and the consequence of the decline of print could be the decline of logic and reason in the world.  Heightened emotions can have community formation benefits. But they also can fuel discontent and polarization.

The years since the assassination have been a time of continuous communication revolution. And what has become clear to this communication professor is that the way virtually everything works changes with each new dominant medium.  Family interactions change. Individual behaviors and beliefs change. Elections change, along with what it takes to win. Government functions and perceptions  change. And even religions and denominations change. There indeed is some truth to the “we are what we eat” theory of communication!

Today we are a global village in mourning over a great leader. Our many thoughts include what might have been. But tomorrow we still will face the complexities and contradictions of how communication media can establish communities one day… and then the next day tear them apart.