Communication scholars face an exciting and critical juncture as we try to better understand and shape the parameters of our changing technological and academic environment. Born in the dawn of the television era, at a time when the academic job market was expanding, ICA needs to assume a role of international leadership as we confront both the age of digital globalization and an uncertain academic horizon that presents new challenges for our newest scholars. As a member of the ICA for nearly 40 years, I am proud of its accomplishments and in particular of its serious commitment in recent years to supporting and engaging with communication scholars who pursue various paths, with scholarship that crosses many disciplines and epistemological perspectives, and with scholars and scholarship from many parts of the world. As President, I hope to take ICA to new levels in addressing these challenges, for both existing and future members of the association.

My longstanding academic experience has prepared me to take ICA in this direction. My own research agenda has spanned many domains of communication scholarship. I entered the field from social psychology at the height of the "television age" and spent several decades charting the influence of mass media, television in particular, in shaping the world views, attitudes, and beliefs of citizens. Working with George Gerbner, and our students-turned-colleagues Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli, we developed Cultivation Theory, a term denoting television's role as the common denominator of cultural experience for massive audiences spanning age, gender, socioeconomic status, and education. Though broadcast television remains a central conduit of experience, conclusions drawn during the era of homogenized mass media must now be re-examined in light of the Internet's fragmented audiences and multidirectional transmission, making this an exciting moment for communication scholarship.

Building on my research on the role of media, I've studied and written about the impact of representations on the images and self-images of minorities, with a particular focus on the relationships of GLBT folk and the media. This resulted in two books and a reader, as well as engagement with developing the academic field of GLBT studies.

I also spent a large part of my academic career studying the role of the arts and the power and challenges of visual communication. Work in these areas included coediting the journal Studies in Visual Communication and two anthologies on image ethics.

Finally, as an administrator - in numerous roles in 35 years at Penn's Annenberg School, serving as the Sol Worth Professor and Deputy Dean before moving to USC's Annenberg School in 2003 as Director of the School of Communication - I am familiar with the opportunities and challenges for academic work in and beyond the Ivory Tower.

My experience tells me that we at ICA have the opportunity and obligation to reopen multiple previously settled questions, and if elected President, I hope to orient the association in several directions.

First, communication and information technologies are the stuff of news headlines around the world, as politicians, interest groups and the public debate assumptions about the capabilities of technologies, choices regarding their adoption, and the consequences of their presence in our lives. ICA members should be active and central players in these discussions: We can and should provide evidence, argument, and wisdom to the students in our classrooms, our fellow citizens, and the public officials and institutions charged with making and implementing policies regarding the technological landscape.

Second, in an era of worldwide digital communication we should actively pursue possibilities for virtual meetings and conferences that can supplement the annual physical conferences now absorbing so much of our collective attention and resources. With ever more expensive and constrained resources for print-based publication, we need to consider whether it is possible to actively develop and implement electronic, online venues for scholarly publication so as to better address the expansion of the field and the careers of individual scholars. As the cofounder and coeditor (with Manuel Castells) of the online-only, multimedia, free, peer-reviewed International Journal of Communication (http://ijoc.org), I am well-acquainted with the opportunities the virtual world can offer and hope to further incorporate them within ICA's intellectual horizon.

Third, we have an obligation to think beyond the confines of the academic world, not only by ensuring that our scholarship contributes to the important decisions of daily life, but also by consciously broadening our definitions of what we offer our students and what we expect from them. A growing number of doctoral graduates in communication pursue careers primarily or partially outside academia, and it is our obligation as teachers and citizens to find ways to help them contribute to society and benefit the common good.

I believe that we can accomplish these aims because my longstanding experience with ICA has shown me that the association rises effectively and powerfully to the goals it sets for itself. My experience at ICA is wide-ranging: Over my 4 decades of membership, I have served as Chair and member of task forces on diversity, and the nominating and research award committees. An active member of seven divisions (Ethnicity and Race, Feminist Scholarship, Journalism Studies, Mass Communication, Philosophy of Communication, Popular Communication, Visual Communication) and the founding chair of the GLBT interest group, I have served on the editorial boards of three ICA journals. I am an elected ICA Fellow, and I received the Aubrey Fisher Mentorship award in 2001.

I have written, edited and coedited nine books and over 80 journal articles and book chapters, advised 50 Ph.D. dissertations and scores of Masters theses, and served on numerous editorial boards of journals and book series, including as Associate Editor of Oxford's International Encyclopedia of Communications. I am also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. For more about what I've done, see http://annenberg.usc.edu/Home/Faculty/Communication/GrossL.aspx#expand.

If given the chance, I hope to help sustain ICA's previous levels of excellence, expanding opportunities for public involvement, respecting and incorporating multiple vantage points, and moving the organization towards a fuller engagement with the emerging internationalized digital era.