Reality is about coming to terms with human experience.
Sometimes, it takes a lifetime to make sense of what we see, feel and think about.
Often, I have have a hard time believing that living in a visual culture such as ours makes visual perception any easier. In fact, I would suggest that since the advancement of optical prosthetics, like cameras, coming to terms with what is “reality” has become actually much more mediated and extenuated.
Marshall McLuhan was a careful observer of the interstice between technology and humanity.
McLuhan understood, that what some people call development and progress, causes alarm for others. He belived that there is a psychic and physical cost of technological innovation and enterprise that is often overlooked in modern times.
When we privilege one sense over another, are we inadvertently changing the course of our interactions with the world—with how we listen, taste and touch? The demands of modern-day visual encounters, those images we consume through watching television, reading magazines, or surfing the Internet, place us in a situation where we do more looking than actual seeing.
I seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle of thinking about images that injure. At the risk of wearing out my soapbox, I find myself coming back to the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
It has been three years since pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq exposed the public to what turn out to be one of the defining moments of the conflict.
The graphic scenes of humiliation and torture that began to appear in April 2004 subvert any claims to a moral victory in Iraq by U.S. and coalition forces. In addition, images taken during an investigation into a 2005 massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqis in Haditha by U.S. forces show the power of pictures as evidence of violence and suffering.
More than 250 images and nearly two-dozen videos made by guards at the prison are now part of our national collective memory of the war.
Reduced to grainy snapshots depicting the horror and deprivation of prisoners of war, a simple truth reveals how capable we are of inflicting injustice on humanity.
The reality recorded here, of course, is not new in the history of so-called civilization, but it does provide “hard” evidence of our ability to do great harm in the name of all that is good about our country. Perhaps, what these images represent is far more than what they depict. The images signify the mockery of our nation as peaceful, tolerant, and just.
Has anything changed in the time since the release of the first set of prison abuse pictures?
Can images contribute to justice served?
A few people are now in jail and forgotten in the eyes of the media. A few people have been demoted in rank and have returned to obscurity.
Through the lens, a central narrative in this conflict has been dutifully recorded for prosperity and it’s not a pretty picture.
How can we look at these images of tortured prisoners and see human beings?
One reading of these images is that they are not pictures of people at all. These are pictures of things. Objects. Once pictured, people are reduced to objects of possession. Those who dare to understand the implications of such images are singed with grief. Something insidiously evil is at work in the world today and we’ve got pictures to prove it.
These images – a naked truth revealing how human beings are strapped, bloodied, humiliated, and stripped of dignity – signify a larger tragedy in the cultural pathology of a society saturated with visual messages. We may look at these pictures and remain unmoved. We may see them but still be blinded by apathy and what can only be called the propaganda of mass distraction.
Does the insistent bombardment of visually mediated messages depicting suffering and deprivation reduce our capacity to feel?
Sontag observed, “In a modern life – a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention – it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.”
Writers use frames to organize ideas and concepts into meaningful structures. Take any issue reported in the news today – war, poverty, justice, economics, education, environment – and frames emerge as overarching structures in presenting an opinion.
At the center of an argument, idea, opinion, commentary, analysis, or editorial is a frame – a general abstraction that envelops a wider array of phenomena. Framing is way in which communicators define specific social realities. For Hertog & McLeod (2001), “Some of the most powerful are myths, narratives, and metaphors that resonate within the culture.”
Hertog & McLeod argue that frames have tremendous symbolic power, carry excess meaning, and are widely recognized within a society. For instance, the use of the “horse race” metaphor helps to frame a debate in a political election in terms of winners and losers.
Brummett (1999) looks to theorist Kenneth Burke’s idea of the “representative anecdote” in terms of understanding how the media frame the news. “Because the audience expects the world to be mediated to them dramatically, and because the media do so by calling up standard, recurrent, culturally ingrained types of dramas, the anecdotal for of the media fits well with Burke’s notion of form as the arousing and satisfying of expectations. We expect newscasts of Presidential election results to be cast into a “horse-race” plot, for instance” (p. 483).
Frames can be thought of as both cognitive and cultural structures used to understand the social world. “Frames provide the unexpressed but shared knowledge of communicators that allows each to engage in discussion that presumes a set of shared assumptions” (Hertog & McLeod, p. 141).
Stephen Reese suggests, “Frames are organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (p. 140).
Words and images combine, sometimes colliding, to frame social reality by linking assigned meanings and concept that universally understood within a culture. Early this year, the Sago mine disaster illustrated how news story develop through the cognitive and culture structuring of frames. Headlines such as “Miner Miracle”, “Miracle in the Mine”, “ Miracle in West Virginia”, reveal the framing of a phenomenon. Framing an event as a miracle implies divine and supernatural intervention in the course of human affairs.
Frames appear dependent on mental imagery that is tied to cultural and social constructs. In turn, the frame functions sum up the essence of something. The frame can be considered in terms of “miracle” a symbolic strategy in the formation of a discourse. The visual and verbal language encompassing the “miracle” frame becomes a persuasive determinant in the construction of how people may process calamity and trauma.
The “miracle” is a dramatic framing of a plot. This is hardly the first time, nor the last, that the media has used the frame of a “miracle” to explain an event. The term has become a master metaphor for passing off anything that cannot be easily understood.
