Framing...

Framing.....hmm....there's a tricky one.

To me, or rather the way I think of framing, is that framing is the thoughts we connect to a certain object, image or situation. Humans naturally compartmentalize things in our brains nowadays.  When you think of something, the thoughts that surround it are its frame. At least that is how I understand it.

The aspects of framing I found intriguing upon reading about it are linguistic framing, because I love languages and I love learning about them, the co-evolution of man with his tools, because the evolution of man is just an all around fascination topic, and the concept of the metaphorical cyborg, because I've somewhat become interested in how and why humans have become so dependent on technology.

I speak four languages. Learning each of them was dificult but fun. As such, I guess I sort of have a love of linguistics and their inner workings. Spanish is my first language, then when we moved to the United States, I had to learn English.  In elementary school I had several friends from France and we took French so I learn as much of it as I could(unfortunately  I'm still not fluent) and my grandmother taught me how to speak Italian. Anyway, the concept of linguistic framing is rather intriguing to me. The part where George Lakoff says:

"Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

See now that's fascinating and shows how language is not all conjugations and memorization but it has emotion of sorts and it has more than just the pattern of how it is written or spoken. Language is not just one of man's tools but it does bring me to my next point. Language, like man's tools, has evolved with him over time. From the hand-axe to the computer, man has always been dependent on some sort of tools that have helped him perform tasks he would not be able to perform otherwise. Now there is no one that can deny that man is dependent on the computer almost more than any other previous tool. This is apparent where the article on Mazlish says that, "If we are able to truly get our minds around how inseparable we are from our tools and toolmaking practices, it becomes much easier to understand why people are so interested in, worried about (at times), seemingly dependent on, computers and related media."

People are in such denial that we are addicted to our technology that they dont consider that if we just accept that fact, we might be able to move forward as a species instead of always remaining "part machine". We are becoming cyborgs and few people realize it. Now, what is a cyborg, you ask? Well, Donna Haraway's webpage describes it perfectly.


""A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction...Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted...Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality...Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence... I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

Do you see? In each of these different examples, the main topic is not necessarily language, tools or technology, but how we think of and use them. The associations we have with them. The FRAMING.