Framing

There is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile, something that crystalized a bit as I read for my class in posthumanism, as well as in my class on videogames. Technology, as scholars like Peter-Paul Verbeek and many of the people he quotes point out that technology is a kind of mediation. It puts layers in between us and the world around us. Technology serves to reveal layers of reality, but in doing so it is specifically framing it in such ways that constantly change the relationship between subject and object, and even object and surroundings. The unmediated experience, in this way of thinking, perhaps doesn’t exist, with even the tools of our hands changing our experience, moving us to different frames of understanding of the world around us (frames that we happily can move up and down through with quite a bit of ease). I ought to clarify a bit though…I am pulling this idea of framed ideas out of a reading for my videogame class, an essay by Mia Consalvo titled, “There is no Magic Circle.” It is an essay that refers to Erving Goffman’s book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience and G.A. Fine’s book Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds and notes the fact that unlike what the early scholar of play, Huizinga, thought, that play didn’t necessarily create a magic circle that separated it from the world around it, but rather, as indicated by Goffman and Fine, that rather there is a frame system going on, one which Fine points out with games, allows us to move quickly from one layer of framing to another through a process of keying, that is, a set of introductions that can move us in and out of the a game world based on pieces of input (keys) that transform us to another frame of mind. This might be a puppy intruding with a happy face lick (yes, it’s happening right as I write this) or an insistent roommate, spouse, or phone that intrudes on the experience currently being played out.

While very relevant to understanding the social relationships of game players to the world around them, it seems to me that this idea of framing isn’t so far off to the way we are thinking about technologies mediation of experience…and even more interestingly, the way it mediates us. Technology, it seems to me, continually provides a context that we are working within at any particular point. It is part of a series of frames that we are interacting with at any one point, separating and filtering the world around us, deciding not only our relationship with whatever the mediated object is (whether that is game), but also very much deciding how we are perceivable as well. I know when I’m playing a game, and when I am writing a paper, where my face probably looks a bit zombieish, to say the least. The game in a certain way is setting up a frame for how I am perceived in the world around me…probably in part a reason I have trouble playing solo games when there is company about…even if I’m not particularly intent on interacting with that company.

But this goes for many other forms of technology as well. Verbeek speaks about how glasses, a low contrast technology, changes both the perception of the world in front of him, but also people’s perception of him, the subject as well. Being with or without the technology device creates different kinds of frames that he can interact with, especially true as the visual of the frames themselves insert themselves on his world. But there are keys into the movement to the inside and outside of these technological realms. Sometimes it is keyed up by our ability, or more appropriately, our inability to see, or read something (put the glasses back on), sometimes it’s the desire to see beyond our normal range of expectation…or to get a much closer frame of understanding (as in Verbeek’s example of the microscope). These create frames of understanding that we have to key in and out of in order to put them into relationship with the world we know as “reality” (I use the term loosely :) ). The microscope fundamentally changes our experience to such a degree that there needs to be bridges formed, keys in place, for us to even understand how the micro in some way effects the macro (science at its finest :) ), without which the technology becomes a frame through which we have a hard time forming a real relationship with. The frame is very permeable at any one point, and this is important, because we are constantly having to readjust to adjust to every movement of framing that we do in order to experience the world around us, letting both inner and outside influences change our direction, thereby letting me move from zombie gameplayer, or better yet typist, into casual participant in the house in the blink of an eye…as I’m going to do right now.