FRAMING AND FRAME ANALYSIS:Information Processing Theory, Summing up

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

LESSON 41

FRAMING AND FRAME ANALYSIS

While critical cultural researchers were developing reception analysis during the 1980s, a new approach

to audience research was taking shape in the US. This approach had its roots in theories, Symbolic

interaction and social construction of reality. Both these theories argue that the expectations we form

about other people, our social world, and ourselves are one of the basic elements in social life.

All these concepts emphasize that:

1. Our expectations are based on previous experience of some kind, whether derived from a media

message or direct personal experience- that is , we aren't born with them

2. Can be quite resistant to change even when they are contradicted by readily available factual

information

3. Are often associated with and can arouse strong emotions such as hate, fear, or love

4. May be free of our conscious control over them, especially when strong emotions are aroused that

interfere with our ability to make sense of new information available in the situation.

Developing and using expectations is a normal and routine part of everyday life. As human beings we

have cognitive skills that allow us to continually scan our environment, make sense of it, and then act on

these interpretations. Our inability to adequately understand these skills in no way prevents them from

operating, but it does impede our ability to make sense of our own sense making. Sociologist Erving

Goffman in 1974 introduced a theory of frame analysis to provide a systematic account of how we use

expectations to make sense of every day life situations and the people in them. He argued that we

constantly and often radically change the way we define or typify situations, actions, and other people as

we move through time and space.

In other words, our experience of the world is constantly shifting from one world to another without

noticing that a boundary has been crossed. According to him we don't operate with a limited or fixed set

of experience daily existence as having order and meaning. According to Goffman we are always

monitoring the social environment for social cue that signal when we are to make a change. He used the

term frame to refer to a specific set of expectations that are used to make sense of a social situation at a

given point of time.

Frames are like the typication schemes described by BErger and Lukman but they differ in certain

important respects. When we move from one set of frames to another, we downshift or upshift. We

reframe situations so that we experience them as being more or less serious.

For example if you were pretending to fight with a friend but one of you got hurt and the fight turned

serious. You both downshifted. Suddenly, you no longer pulled punches but tried to make them inflict

as much pain as possible, suddenly, you no longer pulled punches but tried to make them inflict as much

pain as possible.

Many of the fighting skills learned during play were used but with a different frame-, you were trying to

hurt your friend. Perhaps as you both tired, one of you told a joke and cued the other that you wanted to

up shift and go back to a more playful frame.

According to Goffman, daily life involves countless shifts in frames and these shifts are negotiated by

using social cues. Some cues are conventional and universal, others are very subtle and used by small

groups. E.g. during the course of conversation, many up shift sand downshifts can occur.

So where do media come into this theory? In gender advertisements in 1979 he presented an insightful

argument concerning the influence that advertising could have on our perception of members of the

opposite sex. He argued that advertising that uses the sex appeal o women to attract the attention of men

inadvertently teaches us social cues that could have serious consequences. He showed how women are

presented a less serious and more playful than men in numerous advertisements. Women smile, wear

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colorful clothing and in various ways signal deference and willingness to take direction from men. But

could these representations of women be teaching social cues that have unexpected consequences?

We might be learning more than product definitions from these ads . We could be learning a vast array

of social cues, some blatant but others quite subtle. Once learned, these cues could be used in daily life

to make sense of members of the opposite sex and to impose frames on them, their action, and the

situations in which we encounter them.

Goffman's theory provides an intriguing way of assessing how media can elaborate and reinforce a

dominant public culture, advertisers did not create sex-role stereotypes, but Goffman argues that they

have homogenized how women are publicly depicted.

Ads both teach and reinforce cues. The specific message that each of us gets form the ads will be very

different, but their long-term consequence may be similar- dominant myths about women are retold and

reinforced.

Information Processing Theory

For more than two decades, cognitive psychologists have been developing an innovative perspective on

the way that individuals routinely cope with sensory information: information-processing theory. The

theory is actually a large set of quite diverse and disparate ideas about coping mechanism and strategies

and provides yet another way to study media audience activity. Researchers work to understand how

people take in, process and store various information that are provide by media.

Closely related to systems theory information processing theory uses mechanistic analogies to describe

and interpret how each of us takes in an makes sense of the flood of information that we receive from

our senses every moment of each day.

This theory describes individuals as complex computers with certain built in information handling

capacities and strategies. Each day we are exposed to vast quantities of sensory information; we filter

this information so that only a small fraction of it ever reaches our conscious mind; then only a tiny

fraction of this information is singled out for attention and processing; and then we finally store a tiny

fraction of this in long term memory.

According to some cognitive theorists, we are not so much information handlers as information

avoiders- we have developed sophisticated mechanisms for screening out irrelevant or useless

information. Thus, very little of what goes on around us ever reaches our consciousness, and most of

this is soon forgotten.

Examples while reading a book if you are good in focusing attention on reading, then your are routinely

screening out most of these external and internal stimuli in favor of the printed words on the page. But

just how many of these words are you actually noticing? How many will you remembering ten minutes,

or ten hours, or ten days.

Example viewing television is actually a rather complex task that uses very different information

processing skills than does reading a textbook; you are exposed to rapidly changing images and sounds.

You must sort these out and pay attention to those that will be most useful to you in achieving whatever

purpose you have for your viewing.

But if this task is so complex, why does television seem to such an easy medium to use?

Because the task of routinely making sense of television appears to be similar to the task of routinely

making sense of everyday experience, and making sense of that experience is easy.

Information processing theory offers fresh insight into our routine handling of information. It challenges

some basic assumptions about the way we take in and use sensory data. For example, we assume that we

would be better off if we could take in more information and remember it better. However, more isn't

always better in the case of information. Some people actually experience severe problems because they

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have trouble routinely screening out irrelevant environmental stimuli. Such people are overly sensitive

to meaningless cues such as background noise of light shifts.

Another useful insight from information processing theory is recognition of the limitations of

consciousness awareness. Our culture places high value on conscious thought processes, and we tend to

be skeptical or suspicious of the utility of mental processes that are only indirectly or not at all subject to

conscious control.

We associate consciousness with rationality - the ability to make wise decisions based on careful

evaluation of all available, relevant information. We associate unconscious mental processes with things

like uncontrolled emotion, wild intuition, or even mental illness. We sometimes devalue the

achievements of athletes because their greatest acts are typically performed without conscious thought.

No wonder we are reluctant to acknowledge our great dependency on unconscious mental processes.

According to information processing theory, we can never be conscious of more than a very small

fraction of the information present in our environment , as we absorb large quantities of information ,

we are consciously aware of small fraction. We have to depend on routinized processing of information

and must normally limit conscious efforts to only those instances when intervention is crucial.

Information Processing Model

According to information processing theory, what we need is an ability to routinely scan our

environment, taking in, identifying and routinely structuring the most useful stimuli and screening out

irrelevant stimuli.

Then we must be able to process the structured stimuli that we take in, hold these structures in memory

long enough so that we can sort out the most useful ones, put the useful ones into the right categories,

and then store them in long-term memory.

Described in this way the process seems simple, but cognitive psychologists are finding that the process

is quite complex with many different information screening skills and various processing stages.

Processing television news

Information processing theory has been used most extensively in mass communication research to guide

and interpret research about how people decode and learn from television news broadcasts. Numerous

studies have been conducted and useful reviews of this literature are now available. Remarkably similar

findings have been gained from very different types of research, including mass audience surveys and

small-scale laboratory experiments.

Though most of us view television as an easy medium to understand and one that can make us

eyewitnesses to important events, television is actually a difficult medium to use. Frequently,

information is presented on television in ways that inhibit rather than facilitate learning. Part of the

problem rests with audience members. Most of us view television primarily as an entertainment

medium.

We have developed many disinformation processing skills and strategies for watching television that

serve us well in making sense of entertainment content but that interfere with effective interpretation

and recall of new. We approach the news passively and rely on routine activation of schemas (more or

less highly structured sets of categories or patterns; sets of interrelated conceptual categories).

We rarely engage in deep, reflective processing of news content, so most of it is quickly forgotten. Even

when we do make a more conscious effort to learn from news, we often lack the schemas necessary to

make in-depth interpretations of content or to store these interpretations in long-term memory.

Similarly, news broadcasters also bear part of the blame. The average newscast is often so hard to make

sense of that it can be said to be biased against understanding. The typical broadcast contains too many

stories, each of which tries to condense too much information into little time.

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Stories are individually packaged segments that are typically composed of complex combinations of

visuals and verbal content-all too often the visual information is so powerful that it overwhelms the

verbal. Viewers are left with striking mental images but little contextual information. Often pictures are

used that totally irrelevant to stories.

Likewise, stories with complex structure and terminology or powerful but irrelevant visual images were

poorly understood. Human -interest stories with simple but dramatic storylines were well understood.

Summing up

The theories suggest that our use of media is actually much more complicated than we might like to

assume. Our use of media is an infinitely complex process.

How does someone who believes in the concept of an active audience but who is also working to

understand mass communication do so using contemporary audience theories?

Elihu Katz andJay Blumler two of the creators of the original 1974volume, The Uses of Mass

Communication gave the following advices:

1. Rejection of audience imperialism. Our stress on audience activity should not be equated with a

serene faith in the full or easy realization of audience autonomy.

2. Social roles constrain audience needs , opportunities and choices...the individual is part of a

social structure and his or her choices are less free and less random than a vulgar gratifications

would presume.

3. Texts are also to some extent constraining. In our zeal to deny a one to one relationship between

media content and audience motivation, we have sometimes appeared to slip into the less

warranted claim that almost any type of content may serve any type of function.

4. Their fourth assertion is that these three propositions inject into the uses and gratifications

paradigm an essential element of realism, - without reducing ...our normative commitment to

the would be active audience member and to the provision of media materials designed to

enable him or her to realize his or her purposes.

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