Frames, Fields, and Attachment

How to think about what the media does, and why it matters

C.W. Anderson

College of Staten Island (CUNY)

Christopher.Anderson@csi.cuny.edu

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COM 101 / COM 102

Social

Impact of

Mass

Media

Associational

Affordances of

Fragmented

Media

COM 101

• How journalism and the media frame reality

• Epistemological

COM 102

• How journalism and the media produce objects around which action is oriented

• Ontological

Framing

• Entman (1993): “To select some aspects of a perceived reality and make the more salient in a communicating text, in such a ways a to promote a particular problem definition, [or] causal interpretation.”

• Tuchman (1978): “News frames organize everyday reality.”

Framing (2)

• Entman (1993): “Analysis of frames illuminates the precise way in which influence over a human consciousness is exerted by the transfer (or communication)of information.”

• “Framing in this light pays a major role in the extension of political power.”

Attachment

• Marres (2007): “Denotes a relation between human and non-human entities that is characterized by both ‘active commitment’ and ‘dependency.’ … the notion of attachment enables us to appreciate that actors may be implicated in issues through ontological associations. A particular combination of ‘dependency on’ and ‘commitment to’ such associations characterizes actors involvement in issues.”

What Kind of Object is Latour’s Newspaper?

The New York Times Frames SDS

But So Does the National Guardian

Frames and Counter-Frames

• Marres (2007:) “The notion of frames, to which that of “counter-frames” is sometimes added, sets up a symmetry between contrasting issue definitions, which grant different meanings to different issues, which are more or less able to attract public attention.”

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A Less Comfortable Notion?

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A New Form of Critique?

• Journalists claim: “we’re just ontologists! (shoe-leather reporters)”

• We say: “You’re empistemologists who frame reality!”

• Journalists claim: “We’re epistemologists! (we stand between reality and chaos)”

• We say: “You’re ontologists; kind of like plumbers, but interesting nonetheless.”

From Access to Objects

Harman (2009: “Bruno Latour rejects the [Kantian, “critical”] model of the philosophy of access. In Latour’s cosmos, the universe is not a single mournful chasm between human beings and some real or imagined otherworld. Instead, it is a radical democracy of objects, a duel of human and inhuman actors coupling or uncoupling their forces from various networks …The critical turn, and with it the linguistic and phenomenological turns, belong only to one region of reality, and can no longer serve as master discourses within which all else must give its testimony.”