Northwest Institute for Social Change: The Blog

Framing for the Average Joe

Every once in awhile I do this thing where I try to make a point, and about mid-way through my explanation I realize I’m actually proving myself wrong. It’s a little bit like putting your foot your mouth, only more enlightening and slightly less embarrassing.

We were discussing the issue of framing with Tony Iacarinno. Framing is basically how you put things to people, what vocabulary or metaphors you’ll employ when trying to get your point across. This being Public Policy Week, we’ve been discussing framing in terms of how you go about convincing people of your viewpoint, that a certain issue is important and that they should not only care, but act. Often, you’re trying to employ framing in some limited context – a speech, essay or documentary. In this context, framing essentially reduces incredibly complex issues and narrative webs down to their simplest parts. This oversimplification makes an issue easier to comprehend because it plays off of our pre-existent ideas of the way things are, and evokes emotion. While this isn’t inherently bad, it can and has been used to manipulate and mislead people.

So anyway, the conversation got to a point where we were trying to justify framing. Why is it a necessary tactic? And then I caught myself saying the most elitist thing. We need framing to garner widespread support of the issues because there is power in numbers. The average Joe, I found myself arguing, doesn’t have the time or the energy to seek out the facts, sift through the various sources and viewpoints, because he’s too busy working, paying the bills and feeding the kids. The most widely accessible media sources do an inadequate job of informing the citizenry. Progressive or controversial viewpoints in particular – stories about activism, social movements, radical ideas – often never make it to the mainstream media, or are presented in a one-dimensional, biased way. Having access to more nuanced information about these stories requires not only the time and the energy to research them, but also access to the internet, a priveledge not to be taken for granted. Staying informed and getting involved (as I’m discovering this summer at the Institute) is a lot of work! And the average Joe and Jane, I claimed, didn’t have the time or energy for it.

Of course once I gave that statment a moment of reflection, I instantly thought of a half a dozen counter examples. Suddenly I felt very sheepish. Really, what I had just done, was reacted to the issues we were discussing from my own very situated knowledge frame. What Tony and my peers were saying made me think of last summer when I worked as a waitress at an understaffed greasy-spoon diner in Polson,MT – busting my ass one $2 tip at a time. That summer my worldview came under siege – living with my Fox news devoted grandmother while simultaneously staying up all night having heated discussions about “conspiracy” theories with a new friend I had just met. What I was referring to in my incredibly convaluted, elitist explanation was not the experience of the Average Jane or Joe (what is that, anyway?), but my own personal experience, my own existing frame: exhausted and discouraged with a raging thirst for more information than I was getting from mainstream media.

As a psychology student, it wasn’t hard to convince me that framing is a valid construct to begin with- it’s a basic concept of cognitive psychology. However, I often am unaware of just how powerful and influential these frames are. We oversimplify things all the time. Otherwise, we’d all be too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on to actually accomplish anything.

The point of framing is not to dumb things down for the masses, though sometimes it seems that’s what ends up happening. The point is, if we’re serious about this “social change” thing, we need to find shared values, ideas to bring people together, if not to agree, at least to discuss. We need to realize what we have in common and acknowledge what is at stake for each of us in supporting or neglecting the well-being of our neighbors. We don’t need to dumb things down for the Average Joe – we need to engage him in conversation, listen carefully, and for heaven’s sake, hold on to enough self-awareness to recognize what we have in common.

Accomplishing this will not be easy, but it is possible.