Larry D. Lauer

The presidential election literally shocked me into focusing on understanding the evolving role and power of digital media in leadership.  Looking back, however, I can now see that my interest in media actually began when I was a teenager, and then gradually evolved through several extremely disruptive communication revolutions.

In the late 1950’s I thought the highest calling in life was to be a rock’n roll disk jockey. I was growing up in a working class setting in central Pennsylvania just two hours down the road from Dick Clark and American Bandstand. And I was mesmerized by it all. Announcers somehow could sit alone in a studio unable to see their audiences, and yet still be able to delight millions of people! This seemed magical to me.

Later on at American University in Washington I worked at the campus educational radio (later to become “public” radio) station where program hosts were learning how to delight audiences by appealing to their imaginations. They would read imaginative stories, describe beautiful landscapes, broadcast live performances with colorful descriptions, and generally ask their audiences to sit back and paint mental pictures. It was here where it really sank in that this radio thing was much more than rock’n roll!

But then I had my first encounter with television in 1966 at TCU. Here it became immediately clear that TV’s potential was even greater than radio’s. It could produce an even bigger impact by creatively combining camera movements, picture editing, dramatic sound, and other electronic surprises. TV was able to select what people saw and didn’t see… and then control pacing and timing to produce a completely engaging and often captive dramatic experience. Many viewers admitted they were drawn into this experience so completely that they became unaware of the people around them and would completely lose track of time.

About this time, Marshall McLuhan, a media scholar at the University of Toronto, was describing TV’s growing power in rather compelling ways. His basic observation was simply that when television came into the family, politics, education, government, foreign policy, religion, journalism, etc., all of them went through radical changes in how they functioned. In other words, the medium itself was often more powerful than its content.

It was easy for me to see that when the TV set came into my house it changed the way we arranged the furniture in our favorite room. That alone changed how we spent huge amounts of time. Many families would now be robbed of critical bonding time, leading some analysts to think that this change in interaction might account for reported increases in family problems. In fact, some observers argued that regular viewers were very likely to become more emotional, less rational, and even more prone to resort to violence when provoked. This “you are what you eat” theory of communication is an over simplification, but its overall implications are still worth thinking about.

Fast forward to the current digital and social media revolution and analyze for yourself the time we are now spending with computers, multiple social media platforms, sophisticated cell phones, and the Internet…  and the likelihood that all of these are radically changing society and individuals once again.

There is much to question about the consequences of less human face-to-face interaction, too much information to process, constant challenges to personal values, tendencies for repeated lies to sound true, bewildering changes in leadership dynamics, and the impact of these and other current issues on everyone’s overall sense of well-being.

This must be how I became obsessed with media!