A frame is a colloquial term for “what someone sees as important, what sort of questions they ask or what they’re trying to get out of a conversation.”
I’m not very active on LW and don’t really know how people here use the term “frame”, but this is not at all how I’d define it, personally. To me, an important part about a frame (as I understand and use the term) is that much of a frame is implicit and needs to be inferred. It’s a set of assumptions baked into communication, either/both about the content of the conversation as well as about the terms of the conversation itself. These assumptions may include statements about what roles each person is to take, what certain words mean, what the purpose of the conversation is, what is to be taken for granted, what should be paid attention to, what should be ignored, and so on. Some of these assumptions may of course be made explicit in the conversation.
A lot of the time, people pick up on each others frames and do some sort of implict/explicit navigating to figure out what to do: negotiate, compromise, agree to disagree, ignore differences, fight about it, etc. Sometimes one person consciously or unconsciously submits completely to the other person’s frame. Sometimes no negotiation seems to happen at all and people end up talking past each other.
Off the cuff, I’d define “frame control” as deceptive manipulation of another person’s frame (or, some agreed-upon “shared frame”) to some selfish end. Often this will include subtly introducing assumptions, deflecting attention, verbally saying one thing while nonverbally saying another, etc.
Hmm, I definitely meant my definition of frame to include (and primarily consist) of inferred things rather than explicit things. I’m not sure whether there are other major differences between our uses of the term, but fwiw when I read your comment I mostly thought “hmm, that’s basically what I meant to convey about what-a-frame-is”.
But, last time I had a convo like this the person was meaning something subtly different than what I was meaning. But you say some more words about why your definition of frame feels different from what I said in this post?
The main thing that sticks out at-a-glance is you emphasize “what role people play in a convo or interaction”, which I meant to imply at least somewhat by “what you’re trying to get out of a conversation”.
I’m not very active on LW and don’t really know how people here use the term “frame”, but this is not at all how I’d define it, personally. To me, an important part about a frame (as I understand and use the term) is that much of a frame is implicit and needs to be inferred. It’s a set of assumptions baked into communication, either/both about the content of the conversation as well as about the terms of the conversation itself. These assumptions may include statements about what roles each person is to take, what certain words mean, what the purpose of the conversation is, what is to be taken for granted, what should be paid attention to, what should be ignored, and so on. Some of these assumptions may of course be made explicit in the conversation.
A lot of the time, people pick up on each others frames and do some sort of implict/explicit navigating to figure out what to do: negotiate, compromise, agree to disagree, ignore differences, fight about it, etc. Sometimes one person consciously or unconsciously submits completely to the other person’s frame. Sometimes no negotiation seems to happen at all and people end up talking past each other.
Off the cuff, I’d define “frame control” as deceptive manipulation of another person’s frame (or, some agreed-upon “shared frame”) to some selfish end. Often this will include subtly introducing assumptions, deflecting attention, verbally saying one thing while nonverbally saying another, etc.
Hmm, I definitely meant my definition of frame to include (and primarily consist) of inferred things rather than explicit things. I’m not sure whether there are other major differences between our uses of the term, but fwiw when I read your comment I mostly thought “hmm, that’s basically what I meant to convey about what-a-frame-is”.
But, last time I had a convo like this the person was meaning something subtly different than what I was meaning. But you say some more words about why your definition of frame feels different from what I said in this post?
The main thing that sticks out at-a-glance is you emphasize “what role people play in a convo or interaction”, which I meant to imply at least somewhat by “what you’re trying to get out of a conversation”.