Photographic frames are actually nothing but instantiations
of what are called “cognitive schemas” elsewhere in these blogs: schemas that
help organize what you see; that let out what is unimportant; and bring to the
foreground what is relevant for you. It’s a term that is especially used in
linguistics and psychology. The philosopher Antonio Damasio calls them “maps”,
while the term “frame” is common in sociology for the phenomenon (although the
word is also often used in psychology). The classic book on “frame analysis” in
sociology still is the one by Erving Goffman with the same title, published in 1974.
Maybe the subtitle of this book describes best what framing is about: The
organization of experience. The photo of the napalm girl discussed by me last
week shows well how this works.
Goffman’s Frame
Analysis is quite a thick book (nearly 600 ages) and in my blogs I can’t do
justice to it, but let me pick a few elements from it. As we just have seen,
for Goffman framing is a matter of organizing experience. More exactly, for him
framing is a method we use for defining a situation we are involved in; so it
is a way to give it an interpretation. He sees frames as “principles of
organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective
involvement in them” (pp. 10-11). For instance, suddenly I hear a bang and I
see people running. I wonder what is happening and what I have to do. Is it an
explosion? Is it a terrorist attack? Does it come from the exhaust pipe of a
car? Depending on how I interpret the bang, so how I frame it, and the reason I
am there – am I a passer-by, a policeman or do I live there? – I decide what to
do: Nothing, or going to the site for getting more information, calling for
help, running away, etc. A frame is individual, as Goffman says a few pages
further, it is subjective and, as I want to add – but certainly Goffman says it
elsewhere in his book – it has consequences for our behaviour: from doing
nothing and accepting as it is till taking action.
Most framing doesn’t happen explicitly and
consciously. Goffman’s explanation is a bit complicated, so let me say it in my
own words: As soon as someone recognizes a situation, he or she automatically
applies a framework or schema of interpretation. Since everyone has gone
through a shorter or longer period of education and internalization, initially he
or she falls back on the concepts and standard interpretations typical for his
or her culture when interpreting an event or situation. Goffman talks here of
“primary frameworks”. So if we see someone taking a book from a shelf in a
certain type of building and giving a sheet of paper to another person, we
automatically apply the framework “buying a book” (p. 21; the example is mine).
Primary frameworks can be of two kinds, so Goffman:
natural and social. Again I want to use my own words. A framework is “natural”
– not to confuse it with the term “natural frame” as I used it in my blog last
week – if it is purely physical and if its meaning does not depend on the
willful agency and intentionality of other people. On the other hand it is
“social”, if it gets its meaning from the wills, aims and intentions of others.
So a certain object is for us just a round thin piece of copper if considered
in the natural way or a five-cent piece if interpreted within a social
framework. (cf. pp. 21-22) Dealing
with objects within a natural frame requires instrumental action, while within
a social frame it involves rule-guided action.
By applying frames we constitute what we see and
experience. Often frames are shared among individuals in the sense that they
apply more or less the same frames to the same situations or events. Then all
share an understanding of what it is that is going on and what everyone is
doing, and then the frame concerned is “effectively correct” (cf. p. 301). In this way shared frames
make that people stick together so to speak.
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