Seeing (beyond) the frame

In Perth, the ancient capital of Scotland, there's a red sandstone sculpture on a small rise of land overlooking the river Tay. It offers an unlikely but effective point of reference in thinking about how we might move towards a more visionary use of media. The sculpture features two large L-shaped pieces of stone. The uprights of each are about six feet high. The horizontal line of the bases (which are flush with, and fixed to, the ground) are three feet long. These two giant lithic Ls are placed with a gap between the foot of each letter so that you can walk between them. One side of the Ls is decorated with an oak-leaf motif. The other side is plain. The overall effect is of a giant incomplete picture frame, through which the city may be viewed. Its creator, Timothy Shutter, entitles the work ‘Millais' Viewpoint’.

As a frame, ‘Millais' Viewpoint’ is highly unusual in that frames themselves almost never constitute what an artist wants us to look at. Frames tend to be functional and unremarked on, something taken for granted. They're merely the surrounds that contain and direct us towards what we're meant to look at, rather than being part of the painting. Indeed, we're rarely aware of seeing them at all. If we become so, if they break out of their customary anonymity and intrude upon our attention, it would generally be reckoned that it was because they'd failed. Usually we only see them if they're too ornate, wrongly shaped, a poor colour match, or if they offend the eye in some other manner such that they, and not the view they're meant, invisibly, to set before us, become the object of our notice. I want to argue here that learning to see frames, becoming aware of their provenance, presence and power in all our media transactions, is an essential pre-requisite for fostering communication ‘as if people mattered’.1

It's rare to have a frame placed centre stage in so tangible a manner as in Shutter's sculpture. It opens up possibilities that our ordinary encounters with frames simply don't allow. We can walk behind it, become framed by it, become momentarily part of the scene that's viewed when an observer stands in front of it. We can stand back and see things stretching uncontainably beyond the frame, the frame itself framed as a discrete object within a more encompassing outlook. We can hide behind the frame, become indistinguishable from it, step into the picture, step out of it again. We can see how the views it holds within its (incomplete) rectangle shift and change dramatically as we move to the right, move to the left, approach it and retreat again. What it frames changes not only as we vary our standpoint, but also with the time of day, the seasons, the tidal ebbing of the Tay. Wry, self-conscious, incomplete, capable of many readings, ‘Millais' Viewpoint’ is a sculpture much in tune with the postmodern Zeitgeist prevalent in 1997, the year it was made.

Cultivating frame-consciousness

If we're to promote more visionary media, we must recognize the existence and impact of frames that are much less easily noticed than Shutter's sculpture. Before we can change our media perspectives in more than the most minor ways, we need to direct attention to what's usually scarcely noticed, to open up for critical reflection normally invisible aspects of our communication. For all our seeing (all our listening, all our talking), far from being something immediate, straightforward, natural, involves potent elements of tradition, culture, politics, economics and other shaping participles of particular perspective. What falls upon the eye and mind is mediated, shaped, positioned, valued, according to a whole range of intermediate factors. It's not the raw unsullied face of the world that appears to our consciousness, virginal, untouched, simply as it is. Rather, all our outlooks are freighted with presupposition, weighted with history, ringed, circumscribed and focused by a whole plethora of factors that together construct the frames we see through.

These frames are not the tangible wooden, metal, or plastic constructs that rim canvases and define the borders of a painting, still less the massive sandstone of ‘Millais' Viewpoint’. Rather, we need to become aware of the many invisible conceptual constructs that frame and define all of our communication, shaping the stories we tell and listen to, determining which narratives will be included and which excluded, defining who our heroes and villains will be, deciding what values will be accorded to different aspects of our lives.

The way in which any subject is framed in our cognition will determine a whole range of attitudes and actions. According to how we frame things, so will we adopt attitudes of reverence or contempt, tolerance or intolerance, confrontation or reconciliation. Framings, in other words, mould the manner in which we see the world, the way we behave towards each other and, as such, how societies are shaped and history unfolds. Such framings can make us murderous or compassionate. To take one small example, in Northern Ireland, where each side of the sectarian divide has tended to demonize the other, ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ are often framed within the distorting enclosures of bigotry, rather than seen with any kind of phenomenological or historical accuracy (still less empathy). The result, which of course serves to reinforce the frames that led to it, has been the tragedy of modern Ulster's years of discrimination, segregation, confrontation and violence. As such, moves towards less adversarial framings, framings that allow space for more than one story to be heard (such as those implicit in the integrated schools movement), are to be welcomed. Only thus will the desperately needed new vision emerge which alone can facilitate any lasting reconciliation.2

On a wider scale, history has shown repeatedly how perceptions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other faiths can lead to barbarism or creative encounter depending on whether their adherents frame religions other than their own as potentially insightful or inevitably erroneous. Likewise, the way in which we frame nationalities, ethnic groups, genders, sexual orientations, can result in harmony or holocaust. Learning to see the way in which different media frame the world, learning to see the way in which we frame other people whenever we communicate, and understanding the colossal power of such framings, is to make a start on the vital task of becoming self-conscious communicators. Only then will we be able to see (beyond) the frames, to choose those that are conducive to empathy rather than antipathy, and to respect diversity rather than uncritically accepting the insistent uniformity of vision which the mass media tend to promote.

Media framings

Kevin Robins is one of many commentators to point out that ‘to watch television in our culture is to be exposed to violence, suffering and death’. In both documentary and fictional strands of programming, it's ‘difficult to avoid the sight of actual or contrived dying.’ (Robins, 1996:114).3 In other words, one of the most powerful frames that one of our most powerful media erects for us to look through is one that selects for violence, death, disaster. If we're not to have our more hopeful narratives drowned out, it's imperative that we learn to see the frames that mass media construct and to appreciate the quite different stories that are told outside them. To take Northern Ireland as an example again, it would be instructive to contrast the lurid framings selected by news bulletins with, say, the account that might be gleaned by postcards sent home by Dutch students on a cycling holiday around the Province. Perhaps a rule of media literacy should be that we compare the pictures offered by small-scale, personal communication (letters, postcards, conversations) with those that emerge from large-scale, impersonal corporations (television, radio, newspapers). Balancing immediate coverage of acts of violence with a ‘close listening’ to their continuing consequences (perhaps as described through the voices of victims) might also be recommended.4

Robins' general assessment is confirmed by Susan Moeller in Compassion Fatigue, a book that pinpoints with admirable deftness and detail the nature of media perspectives (including, crucially, the timeframes they impose). Moeller is well aware that mass media are part of the entertainment industry and that they will therefore frame things accordingly, even when it comes to disease, famine, war and death.5 Nonetheless, she urges us to remember that ‘reporting the news is both a political and moral act’ because ‘the media decide what in the world is worth covering’. Moreover, they ‘introduce us to our global neighbours’ (Moeller, 1999:320). Alas, the manner of their introductions often results in demeaning and sometimes deadly caricatures of those with whom we share this planet. And their choice of which stories to put before us and which to ignore often leads to an impoverished vision of things that's blinkered by the imperatives of entertainment and a resulting news-tradition that selects for what shocks, aggravates, or titillates, rather than for what matters.

Given the enormous power of the media in influencing our outlook, a power reinforced by incessant repetition such that their view of things is drummed into our consciousness until it becomes accepted as the norm,6 how can we avoid becoming locked into the framings they promote? Clearly this is not a question that can be adequately answered in a short article, but I think cultivating an awareness of the situation, becoming self-conscious about our communication practice, must be the foundation for any formula that is spelt out. How such a reflexive element can most effectively be fostered is, again, something that calls for more sustained treatment than is possible here. But it seems likely that we would need, at the very least, to educate, legislate and alternate in moving towards this goal. Education would help us to see (beyond) the frame, legislation would help to ensure that those frames adopted by the media met with specified standards, alternation would keep us mindful of other points of view. (Religion, as Margaret Miles has suggested is one ‘different way of seeing’ (Miles, 1985:4). As such, it would be prudent to keep religious perspectives in mind alongside those we more customarily adopt.

Learning to manage information and freedom

Towards the end of his magisterial study, The History and the Power of Writing, concluding a chapter which reflects on the implications of those new media that seem to take us beyond writing altogether, Henri-Jean Martin stresses an obvious, but sometimes forgotten, point that any programme of media reform must recognise. Namely, that ‘beyond technology and institutions there are human beings’. The individual, says Martin, has to be ‘taught to manage’ both the ‘abundance of information’ and the ‘gift of freedom’ that characterise our age. We need to remember, he says, that ‘the end of human society is the human person. Not in the material sense, as the subject of economics and history, but as a moral and spiritual being’ (Martin, 1994:506). It is the human being, the individual watcher, reader, listener, the individual reporter, editor, photographer, rather than the technology or institutions created and used by them, that needs primarily to be addressed.

The rationale behind the kind of media reform I've outlined above is quite straightforward and easily stated: each of us has a responsibility for the ways in which we allow the world to be framed. This means learning to act responsibly amidst the abundance and freedom that Martin identifies, rejecting those frames that create pictures which demean, distort, ignore or ridicule (however alluring, easy, accepted or entertaining they may be). Our concern should not be to advance some particular ideal framing, whether religious or political, but rather to promote an awareness of the existence of many different framings and the limitations of each. And we need to cultivate an appreciation of the fact that their diversity offers a much richer source of meaning and value than could ever be derived from any one perspective. We need to learn how to find viewpoints rather than to put on blinkers, to avoid becoming prisoners within closed, rigid, invisible frames which result in impoverishing outlooks.

Timothy Shutter's sculpture on the banks of the Tay does not insist that we view only the violence in Perth, or that we pick out the thread of the sexual, or concentrate exclusively on the lives of the rich and powerful. Instead, it provides an incomplete frame that does not impose closure, that allows a variety of stances to be taken, that insists on being a visible part of the story. As such, it is surely an image which ought to be allowed ‘authority over our imagination’ in its quest for the kind of visionary media so badly needed as we move uncertainly into the new millennium.

References

Birkerts, Sven. (1994). The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York, Faber & Faber.

Martin, Henri-Jean. (1994). The History and the Power of Writing. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Miles, Margaret. (1985). Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture, Boston, Beacon Press.

Moeller, Susan D. (1999). Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Famine, War, and Death, London & New York, Routledge.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. (1941). The Nature and Destiny of Man; a Christian Interpretation. London, Nisbet & Co.

Postman, Neil. (1987). Amusing Ourselves to Death. London, Methuen.

Robins, Kevin. (1996) Into the Image: Culture and Politics in The Field of Vision, London & New York, Routledge.

Schumacher, E.F. (1973). Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London, Blond & Briggs.

Chris Arthur (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Wales Lampeter, United Kingdom. He was Gifford Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (1984-86) and Research Fellow in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Edinburgh (1986-89). He is the author of In the Hall of Mirrors (1986); Biting the Bullet (1990); The Globalization of Communications (1998) and, most recently, Irish Nocturnes (2000).