Framing: interpersonal
the protected as subordinate’. However, arguably
because men and women are fundamentally
tuned to interpret some aspects of conversa-
tion diff erently, the diff erence in relative status
signalled by such comments may be more
apparent to men than women. Women may
simply interpret them as indicating a desire to
protect or be supportive rather than as indicative
of women’s traditionally subordinate status in
society. See gender; genderlects.
★Framing: media The process by which the
media place reality into frame; and the study of
the process of framing is at the core of media
analysis, hence the length of this entry. Framing
constitutes a narrative device. What is not on
the page of a newspaper is ‘out of frame’; what
does not appear within the frame of the TV is
off the public agenda. For the news, there is the
world – and 20 minutes (or 24 hours) to put it
in the frame. Time, then – the extent of it – is
an important deciding factor. For a soap opera,
time also poses problems of framing. Th ere areFraming: interpersonal Conversations are
often framed by metasignals that let observers
and participants know what kind of activity is
going on so that they are better able to interpret
the conversation. For example, is the conversa-
tion a serious argument or horseplay?
Such signals also allow people to recognize
what Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis
(Harper & Row, 1974) terms the alignment, that
is the relative positions with regard to status,
intimacy and so on, being taken by the partici-
pants – themselves included. If A, for instance,
explains something to B in a condescending
manner, A is taking a superior alignment with
regard to B.
In You Just Don’t Understand: Men and
Women in Conversation (Virago, 1992), Deborah
Tannen argues that protective comments and
gestures from men towards women ‘reinforce
the traditional alignment by which men protect
women’. She goes on to argue that ‘the act of
protecting frames the protector as dominant and
Framing reality