1.2 Additive and transformative frame changes
Reflecting on evidence from personal experience is the beginning of scientific theory. In the previous section you experienced how frames can shape sense-making, so you now have a personal evidence base from which to arrive at a very important theoretical insight. Namely, what you have learned about framing so far points to two types of change relevant to sense-making:
- Additive change – change whereby ever more details are added within the frame of an already existing pattern of sense-making.
- Transformative change – change whereby the pattern of our sense-making itself changes as a new frame arises.
Activity 2 What’s in a frame, and what lies beyond it?
Look once again at the images of Serena Williams, and reflect on what you experienced when you first clicked the close-up image and saw the bigger picture. Spend 2–3 minutes thinking about why the close-up image was so deceptive compared to the second, wider image. Then write down your thoughts about how your sense-making might have gone through:
- additive changes
- a transformative change
Assuming you could identify a transformative change, also note down why you think this transformation happened.
Discussion
You might have noted that, on one level, in the wider picture (i.e. the zoomed-out frame), you simply see more of the context. For example, you see Serena Williams’ body as well as her face, and you see some things in the foreground and background. You see the raised left fist, the tennis racket firmly gripped by the right hand, the sports clothing and the signage on the arena behind her. All of these details add more information about the sporting context that were missing from the close-up. In other words, quite a lot of real context had been deliberately removed from the close-up picture compared to the wider picture; indeed, practically everything except the facial expression itself. This missing context, then, was added back in when the frame was expanded.
You may also have noticed that these additional details do not just accumulate in an additive way to the impression you form. Rather, at a certain point, it is likely that the whole pattern of your sense-making was completely transformed. Although we cannot know for sure, we think you probably experienced a small example of transformative change when you realised the woman in the picture was joyful, not terrified. That is, as the frame zoomed out, you did not simply experience more information added to an unchanging core. To the contrary, we would predict that what you experienced went through a change of frame in which the very pattern of your sense-making shifted. The observed facial expression shifted from a terror or fear pattern to a joy pattern.
A large part of this transformation likely arose when you realised the actual context of this facial expression (i.e. that it was part of a tennis match). You may not have realised that it was Serena Williams from the first image you saw. And even if you still didn’t recognise her after seeing the bigger picture, at least you could grasp that she is a tennis player.
But you may also have noted that it is not just that important contextual information was removed from the close-up (and added back in by the big picture). Rather, a key manipulation was actually something added to the close-up (and something false). This key manipulation was, of course, the discursive description ‘look at the terrified woman in the image below’. Together, these features of the bigger picture that had been removed in the close-up, and this deceptive feature that was added to it, are likely to have been key to the transformation of your sense-making. Essentially, in the close-up, the facial expression alone had been actively abstracted from the wider field of activity in which it had actually been embedded. This focus made the face less comprehensible and made it easier to manipulate your sense-making by adding a new context (by subtle discursive suggestion).
You’ll learn more about such transformative shifts in the pattern of sense-making throughout this course. As you will see, even the second-order sense-making of scientists can go through such transformations (sometimes called a ‘paradigm shift’).
Activities 1 and 2 were designed to teach you, through your own experience, some important points about sense-making. In summary, these include the ideas that:
- we are second-order sense-makers who try to make sense of other sense-makers
- we always make sense from a perspective or point of view
- any perspective provides a limited frame for sense-making, and there are always different frames with different perspectives to be found
- a different perspective may simply add new information to some information we already had, leaving this original information more or less the same; but a new frame may completely transform the meaning of the original information
- perspectives can change dynamically over time.
In the next section, you will develop these ideas in a more complex example by considering moving, rather than still, images. Introducing this temporal dimension will help you grasp how, in everyday life, the frames for our sense-making are dynamic and ever-changing. Thus, the process of making sense is always provisional because it is ever ongoing.