Framing

Wouldn’t it be great if you could put a frame around a conversation so when voice(s) try get a hold of the markers and run straight off the canvas on some doodle, they’d hit the edge of it and come ricocheting back to finish the project at hand?

The ability to reframe an image quickly has taken a lot of uncertainty out of successful modern photography. Whereas one once spent time manually capturing the image through the lens, now one worries mostly about high resolution. Unhappy with tipping or cropping? A few clicks and it’s done! Take one photo and clip it four ways to tell four stories.

Framing topics of discussion is not so simple. There can be lack of guidance as to what information is admissible, as to the boundaries of the topic. And that’s just the subject matter, data, facts. Then there is the obscurity of the wealth, or limitations, of your interlocutor’s personal experiences.

Roya Hakakian, an Iranian-American poet, has a new book out: A Beginner’s Guide to America for the Immigrant & the Curious. In an interview today she explained that her writing is a way of showing the American people what is like to be an immigrant in a foreign land. And through this process help people to reframe issues.

But what if the audience in question has very few points of reference?

For instance, when I returned to the US in the early 80’s to attend a small liberal arts college, I befriended woman who had never been allowed to venture to downtown Minneapolis. The 8 mile trek from her affluent first tier suburb was considered to risky. To entertain a meaningful discussion about safety when the granular degrees of life’s experience are so excessively narrow in one instance, and so comprehensively broad (so as to include a childhood immersed in revolution and an eventual flight from one’s homeland) seems improbable.

And what is challenging in public conversation, is that more times than not, you do not know your interlocutor’s framing. Are they looking at the river in the upper left photo, concerned primarily about water quality? Are they focusing at what is going on beneath Hennepin Avenue Bridge? Do they just have the bridge in focus as a source of river crossing and transport? Or are they in those tall condos valuing the view of the river and the Minneapolis skyline beyond?

When two people fail to find common ground for the basis of a discussion, the outcome is frustration and a few slurs on Twitter. Irritating yes, but there are worse things. Here is a case where lack of framing leads to detrimental rule making.

Say a city was weathering a period of fast rising rents. Maybe this inflation was even due to a catch-up period as real estate prices had been atypically low in preceding years. But the acceleration scares people. Especially young people with short time horizons. So they rally and want action. They point to the recent data to convince the public that markets must be constrained. If not the 4%, 5% increases will continue to 6%,7%,8%!

The data over a long term, however, shows a modest increase in annual rents of, let’s say, 2%. The city council members prefer to keep their framing on the short term as this is most effective. It seems there maybe a role here for the Federal Government. If rescue funds were made available (like Covid funds are now) to the truly needy after a sharp increase in rent, then the gut reaction to impose rules would be muted. The demand for action satisfied.

Having a rescuer of last resort whose view isn’t immediate, whose view expands to a longer timeline framing, who steps in to ease the burden of those disproportionately effected, this could deter four year politicians from rewriting rules with over a century of good standing.

Whereas less rules keep us nimble in our special combination of an open economy and liberal democracy, erroneous rules take time to undo, reek havoc and prevent progress. Every tier of government can use its framing to ease demand for bad policy.