She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts.
Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)
We’d all like to think we have thoughts rather than mental pictures. Yet as we know, governments, institutions and media spend a great deal of money and effort effectively depicting the world in terms of simple pictures. This includes selecting the frames – framing the scope of the pictures. A narrow scope being generally favoured.
A familiar enough analogy with a long pedigree –
Another line is the use of indignant language, whether to support your own case or to overthrow your opponent’s. We do this when we paint a highly-coloured picture of the situation without having proved the facts of it:
Aristotle - Rhetoric c. 336 - 330 B.C.
Equally familiar is an odd correlation between a good education and pictures which purport to be thoughts. Well-educated people seem prone to accept media-framed and media-painted pictures when even mild scepticism would suggest the frames are too small and the pictures little more than highly-coloured daubs.
Media organisations such as the BBC cater for it - they are in effect picture dealers. They do not even have to like the pictures they sell, nor the frames. They may like them, but it isn’t professionally essential. Ready-framed pictures are easier to place on the walls of the mind we might say, sticking with the analogy.
Do sceptics merely frame different pictures? They may frame issues in unorthodox ways, but often adopt more than one way of framing the same issue. This blog post is merely one way of framing the issue of oversimplified public narratives. There are many others.
As mentioned earlier, many educated people seem naïve in their adoption of pre-framed pictures of social and political issues. Perhaps most are no more than fashion opportunists, including those who block roads in support of a highly-coloured picture of the situation without having proved the facts of it.
Media organisations such as the BBC cater for it - they are in effect picture dealers. They do not even have to like the pictures they sell, nor the frames. They may like them, but it isn’t professionally essential. Ready-framed pictures are easier to place on the walls of the mind we might say, sticking with the analogy.
Do sceptics merely frame different pictures? They may frame issues in unorthodox ways, but often adopt more than one way of framing the same issue. This blog post is merely one way of framing the issue of oversimplified public narratives. There are many others.
As mentioned earlier, many educated people seem naïve in their adoption of pre-framed pictures of social and political issues. Perhaps most are no more than fashion opportunists, including those who block roads in support of a highly-coloured picture of the situation without having proved the facts of it.
Gluing yourself to real pictures in support of fakes is essentially an old, old problem. Not even good art we might add, but maybe that's taking the analogy a little too far.
