Engaging Ourselves to Death? Leadership in the Platform Age

In 1985, media scholar Neil Postman warned that television was turning all discourse into entertainment in his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death. Five years later, he identified a different threat in the proliferation of computer technology: information overload, or what he termed “informing ourselves to death.” Today, we face a more complex challenge that incorporates and intensifies both previous concerns: the imperative of constant engagement on social media, AI-powered platforms, and other digital technologies that fundamentally reshape how we think about, practice, and understand leadership. This engagement imperative not only builds on television’s supra-discourse of entertainment (emphasizing performance, emotion, and spectacle) but also leverages digital information overload to create new forms and patterns of behavior – including around leadership – that are increasingly mediated and transformed by platform dynamics.

Research across various fields has identified different reasons for these difficulties. Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg originally coined the term, “captology,” to refer to the study of how people are motivated or persuaded when interacting with computing products ran than by the information or communication running throughthem (2003). Platforms and social media use have only accelerated the impact of these “persuasive technologies” by designing patterns of cues that trigger emotional responses and compel ongoing engagement. These technologies promote dopamine-driven feedback loops that maintain constant user activity and operate through a combination of entertainment mechanisms and information tactics, as documented in current neuroscience research. In fact, as another Stanford researcher, psychiatrist Anna Lembke argued in Dopamine Nation, the smartphone itself a modern-day hypodermic needle, dosing users with digital dopamine continually (2021).

For leaders, followers, and those who study and develop leadership, these platform dynamics have the potentially to fundamentally reshape how leadership is conceived, understood, practiced, and evaluated. The challenge extends beyond the mere superficiality of interactions or the pace of engagement. Instead, it reflects a deeper transformation in how leadership knowledge is created, shared, and understood within platform-mediated environments. Contemporary leaders must navigate an ecosystem where their thoughts, actions, and relationships are increasingly refracted through and shaped by platform logics, while simultaneously trying to maintain authentic connections with followers whose own understanding of leadership is similarly mediated by these digital interfaces. This conflicted logic – between platform-driven expectations of visibility and interaction and the quest for genuine interpersonal and organizational relationships and – drives the constant engagement of leaders and followers alike.

The Evolution of Leadership Discourse: From Entertainment to Engagement

The Entertainment Legacy

The historical impact of television on leadership discourse, as Postman first identified, was to privilege entertainment value over substance. However, today’s platform dynamics have transformed this relationship in fundamental ways. Leaders now must not only be “televisual” but also “platform-native,” capable of performing leadership across multiple digital, social, and algorithmic interfaces in ways that generate ongoing engagement. This shift also means that effectiveness becomes increasingly tied not just to performance capability but to the ability to maintain consistent presence and engagement across multiple digital and social media spaces. Contemporary platform environments intensify this through what NYU psychologist Adam Alter argues are content architectures deliberately designed to trigger “behavioral addiction” – immediate emotional responses and compulsive engagement (2017). In the process, these architectures and dynamics reshape how leadership itself is understood and evaluated.

The implications of this entertainment-shaped leadership discourse extend far beyond mere content or style. Four decades ago, in No Sense of Place, communications scholar Joshua Meyrowitz argued that electronic media fundamentally affected our lives not through content but “by changing the ‘situational geography’ of social life” – including, we might add, how authority and leadership are performed and perceived (1985: 6). Today’s platform environment has radically accelerated this transformation, creating a kind of “distributed leadership cognition” in which understandings of leadership are collectively constructed through platform interactions and algorithmic content distribution. The result is a leadership landscape where the visual and performative aspects of leadership have not only become inseparable from its substantive practice, but where the very nature of leadership knowledge and development is increasingly mediated by platform dynamics.

The Information Inheritance

The rise of digital media by 2008 had already brought what NYU’s Clay Shirky termed “filter failure.” Rather than information overload, he pointed to the collapse of traditional human mechanisms for evaluating information quality as a major challenge attendant to the increased use of digital technologies (2008). Subsequent social media and platform dynamics transformed this challenge into an understanding of leadership being collectively filtered and reconstructed through platform interactions, algorithmic recommendations, and viral information flows. This evolution has seen leadership knowledge itself is increasingly shaped by platform dynamics, with both leaders and followers developing their understanding of leadership through digitally mediated perceptions, experiences, and interactions.

The consequences of this transformation are particularly acute in leadership development contexts. In an early and influential Harvard Business Review article, Paul Hemp observed that the cognitive demands of managing information flows threatened to cause exactly what Shirky had rejected – “death by information overload” – a state in which the ability of leaders, teams, and companies to process and synthesize information becomes compromised by its sheer volume and velocity (2009). This challenge has evolved into what subsequent organizational scholars identify as a “transparency paradox” whereby the increased use of social media to increase the visibility of information in an organization can often lead not to increased transparency but increased opacity about what information actually matters strategically for the organization (Stohl et al, 2016). The result is a fundamental reshaping of how leadership knowledge is created, shared, and understood, with platform dynamics increasingly mediating both leadership learning and practice.

The Engagement Trap

Performance Metrics

The platform-driven imperative for constant engagement creates new forms of leadership measurement and evaluation that fundamentally reshape how leadership effectiveness is understood and valued. As organizations increasingly focus on engagement metrics, traditional measures of leadership effectiveness are supplanted by quantifiable indicators of platform presence and impact. This shift risks creating a kind of metric myopia in which the ease of measuring engagement begins to obscure the assessment of many human interactions as well as to override other more complex but crucial aspects of leadership effectiveness. AI-powered analytics intensify this problem by creating the illusion of total measurement, further privileging quantifiable leadership behaviors over nuanced human interaction. The result is a transformation in how leadership itself is conceived and evaluated, with platform-based metrics increasingly serving as proxy measures for leadership capability and impact.

This metrics-focused reconceptualization of leadership suggests profound implications for organizational behavior and development. Besides performance metrics, the quantification of leadership communication in digital and social channels, both inside and outside organizations, has the potential to reshape behavior and understanding of leaders and workers. Drawing on the broader work of social scientist Shoshana Zuboff, and her account of surveillance capitalism, the imperative to generate and measure ever-more engagement potentially creates new forms of infrastructure control and performance pressure – which Zuboff memorably calls “Big Other”: – that potentially transform not only how leaders act but how leadership itself is instrumentalized (2019: 6). This dynamic raises the prospect of a metric-driven leadership identity in which leaders and their stakeholders increasingly understand and evaluate their own effectiveness through the lens of platform engagement metrics.

The Context Collapse

While initial formulations of “context collapse” referred to the flattening of audiences by social media into a single context, current understandings embrace multiple dimensions, including the distortion of time, instability of meaning, blurring of public and private boundaries, and conflicting purposes of different platforms (Sarmiento et al 2024: 336). Sociologist Jenny Davis’s work in How Artifacts Afford extends this concept further, showing how digital technologies don’t merely collapse contexts but create new affordances that reshape social relationships and leadership expectations (2020).

The platform environment’s collapse of traditional contextual boundaries creates fundamental challenges for how leadership is understood and practiced. The merging of entertainment, information, and engagement spheres has further erased crucial markers that previously helped define and differentiate social and cultural contexts. Practically, this collapse compels a more context-fluid exercise of leadership in which traditional situational approaches to leadership must be reconceptualized for environments where contexts are constantly shifting and blending. Communicating with and responding to employees and other stakeholders requires continual rethinking and readjustment to ensure coherent messaging.

Yet the implications of context collapse extend beyond communication challenges to include altering the status of social and professional identities – of leaders, workers, everyone – and making them more complex and uncertain. Put more plainly, as MIT’s Michael Schrage does, “An individual’s desire to be experienced as authentic becomes more challenging to satisfy when digital platforms enable different groups to perceive and experience the same message in different ways” (2021). The result is a fundamental transformation in how leadership presence is constructed and maintained, with traditional notions of situational leadership needing to give way to a more fluid form of sensemaking in which leaders continuously reconstruct their understanding and practice of leadership across multiple, overlapping, and constantly shifting platform contexts.

The Platformization of Leadership Discourse

Homogenizing Leadership

In early research on “networked publics,” danah boyd noted how digital technologies and social media require users to develop entirely new approaches to authority, which is no longer “just about who holds power but who is seen as credible and trustworthy” (2014: 132). “Authority is decentralized,” she also wrote, “and credibility is often earned through participation and peer recognition” (Jenkins 2015: 102). Extending her insights to the platform economy suggests the production of a “flattening effect” on leadership discourse, writ large, where many context-specific leadership ideas, practices, and tools are stripped of their original meanings.

This decontextualization process often privileges entrepreneurially-derived leadership approaches – emphasizing rapid scaling, “move fast and break things” (or, at least, scale fast and exit) mentalities, and metrics-driven management – regardless of their appropriateness for different organizational contexts or challenges. The engagement imperatives discussed earlier amplify this homogenization, as leadership content optimized for platform visibility favors easily digestible, universalized principles, and actions steps over nuanced, context-dependent insights. Media Ecologist Andrey Mir observes in his analysis of digital capitalism, engagement has become “the most precious commodity” driving content creation and curation, with AI language models trained on leadership discourse further amplifying the ‘flattening effect’ by generating increasingly generic content that reinforces platform-friendly leadership approaches (2024).

Such a standardization of leadership discourse produces what organizational theorists would call “platform isomorphism” – in this case, the tendency for leadership practices and values to converge around platform-friendly forms and structures (Laaksonen et al, 2024). The result is a leadership landscape where Silicon Valley’s leadership and entrepreneurial lexicon has increasingly become a universal grammar for discussing and evaluating organizational management and behavior across sectors and cultures. The homogenization is particularly evident in how platform algorithms privilege certain types of leadership content, interaction styles, and situational analyses. For instance, rather than openly approaching situations as potential problems, opportunities, or general learning experiences to be responded to, leadership behavior and follower expectations on platforms may be oriented by an assumption of technological solutionism and more consistently see all problems able to be solved (Morozov 2013).

Leaders as Brands

The platform environment increasingly rewards personal branding by leaders that cultivates distinct yet algorithmically optimized personas that can maintain engagement across multiple platforms and in real life, as well. This resonates with the writings of social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson, whose rejection of what he terms “digital dualism” highlights how our online and offline lives are deeply intertwined, leading to new forms of “performative authenticity” where the performance itself becomes a genuine expression of identity. He has long asserted that, “Our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and offline” (2012). For leaders who must simultaneously appear genuine while carefully constructing their online presence to meet the expectations of multiple audiences, the result is often a paradoxical form of leadership presence that is both highly individualized in its surface presentation yet unavoidably shaped by platform dynamics and engagement metrics.

More generally, as Alice E. Marwick writes in Status Update, “social media has come to promote an individualistic, competitive notion of identity that prioritizes individual status-seeking over collective action or openness” (2013: 17). For leaders, this ongoing individual performance of authenticity can convert into social and professional currency. In more tangible terms, an active platform presence that demonstrates thought leadership and a distinctive voice helps to build a personal leadership brand. Yet that very process also risks accentuating leadership as theater – particularly theater that perpetuates the illusion of leaders’ control or competence – through greater platform engagement. This dynamic is particularly evident in how platform metrics – which track and measure followers, likes, shares, and engagement rates – become proxy measures for leadership status and even perceptions of influence and impact, regardless of their relationship to actual organizational outcomes or leadership effectiveness. AI-enhanced leadership content is making the performance of authenticity even more tenuous, creating a recursive loop of performative leadership that further distances leaders from genuine human connection (Noponen, Auvinen, and Sajasalo, 2023).

Leadership Disengagement: Possible Ways Forward

General Approaches to Platform Disengagement

Recent research has begun to outline potential approaches to moderating platform engagement. Adam Alter, Nir Eyal, and Cal Newport are among those to suggest specific strategies to guard attention, reduce distraction, and at include designated periods of platform abstinence, the creation of “deep work” times and spaces free from platform interruption, and more intentional technology use. These approaches align with Anna Lembke’s clinical-based recommendations for “dopamine fasting” from platform engagement, which she argues can help reduce impulsive behaviors and restore more sustainable patterns of attention and decision-making (2021: 71-88). Lembke’s research reveals “a sort of diffuse addiction to the internet” that can involve a different “drug of choice”: “shopping or social media or video games or pornography” (Garcia-Navarro, 2025). AI tools designed for “leadership enhancement” paradoxically risk deepening dependency on platform engagement by gamifying leadership development through metrics and automated feedback, making intentional disengagement practices even more essential. (One cannot help but wonder if, in extreme cases, the endless surfeit of leadership, management, and self-improvement content on digital platforms may be another “drug” around which addictive behavior can form.)

A challenge, then, is to develop and practice leadership that doesn’t demand using digital tools requiring constant and exhausting attention or engagement from anyone involved in the leadership setting. Among such “calm technology” approaches, as digital anthropologist Amber Case notes, is “non-intrusive design,” which prioritizes capturing the smallest amount of our mental attention, doing so only when necessary, and calmly remaining in the background most of the time (2019). This approach also aligns with what psychologist Gloria Mark identifies as the need for “attention restoration” practices that can help leaders maintain cognitive resources in platform-saturated environments (2023). These steps might include structuring periods of both focus and relaxation, taking microbreaks, meditation and deep breathing, and looking at and being in nature. At an organizational level, we might add the development of cultures that don’t equate constant connectivity with leadership effectiveness or high performance.

Leadership On and Beyond Platforms

Harvard organizational theorist Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s “outside the building” framework offers one approach potentially applicable to the complexities of platform-era leadership (2020). To combat excessive platform engagement, leaders must actively step back from the digital fray, enhancing their “cognitive reflective capacity” to critically examine their own assumptions and the broader impact of platform-driven behaviors. Cultivating “kaleidoscope thinking” allows leaders to see beyond the immediate demands and connections – as well as platform-driven metrics and engagement imperatives – to connect seemingly disparate issues and craft holistic solutions. The result is a more grounded leadership practice that uses platforms intentionally while remaining rooted in human experience and fostering human connection. Practical steps include setting boundaries for platform use and redesigning workflows to minimize reliance on constant connectivity and engagement.

The path to more human-centered platform leadership involves many such multiple coordinated actions. Leaders should model healthy digital boundaries and develop hybrid leadership styles that transcend pure platform metrics. Teams and organizations need to create spaces and policies that protect opportunities for more consistent reflection and deep work, like regular periods of platform abstinence, the cultivation of in-person leadership presence and relationship-building, and the development of cultures of psychological safety.Cross-sector partnerships can help establish healthier platform practices and advocate for human-centered technology policies. Throughout all these efforts, the goal should be recovering the human element in leadership by finding ways to lead that privilege genuine human connection and understanding over platform-driven engagement and personal brand management.

The Double-Bind of Leadership in the Platform Era

Still, as we have seen, the challenge facing contemporary leadership extends beyond managing platform time and engagement better or navigating information flows more adeptly. Platforms are unavoidable today and, when designed and used more conscientiously, can be sources of great individual, organizational, and market benefit and advantage. In the current environment, leaders have little choice but to face at once the demands of platform-mediated engagement and the need for authentic organizational relationships. The conflicted logic shapes not only how leadership is practiced but how it is understood, learned, and developed.

The implications of this logic can be profound. Leaders must simultaneously maintain platform presence and authentic relationships, generate engagement while fostering genuine understanding, and navigate between algorithmic visibility and meaningful impact. Generative AI creates an additional dimension to this leadership paradox – leaders must now appear tech-savvy while maintaining authentic human connection in an environment where AI can simulate both. This can create a digital leadership paradox in which the very tools and platforms that enable broader leadership reach and influence can also constrain deeper leadership development and effectiveness.

Yet a more fundamental challenge of platforms exists for leadership and goes beyond the incremental negotiations of the conflicted logic of authenticity and visibility defining platform dynamics. The platform era entails both advancing the mindsets, models, and approaches that leaders and other workers adopt to work with them and recognizing and adapting to the constraints, orientations, and priorities of leadership thinking and practice imposed by platforms themselves, through their algorithms and architectures. Even as platforms become an accepted operating environment for business and leadership, in other words, it is crucial to understand that platforms are not neutral settings in which individuals and organizations interact and discourses about leadership can be circulated.

Put differently, leaders, organizations, and all those who contribute to the wider professional and public discourse around leadership need to formulate new approaches to leadership and leadership development that acknowledge and address the fundamentally different platform era in which we operate. Rather than simply teaching leaders to better navigate platform dynamics or manage information flows or optimize their own or team members’ time use, we need to design and deliver ways to build a more reflective leadership capacity that thoughtfully engages with both platform-mediated and direct human relationships while maintaining authentic leadership presence in both. Only by understanding and actively addressing this double bind of contemporary leadership can we hope to have leaders capable of genuine effectiveness in our platform age

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