Harry Potter and the Eye of the Beholder

People (and wizards) have been vying for centuries for control over some artifact that's greater than the Sorcerer's Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, and the rest of the things that J.K. Rowling found important enough to put in the title of her books (yes I know I fail at life for being unable to list all of them from heart. Yes, of course you can.) And this would be something that would give them the ability to manipulate how people view things. Which they eventually found the first traces of, not in the Ark of the Covenant, some magic cube from Asgard, or hidden in an ancient Incan pyramid, but through the psychological process of framing. Many psychologists died in protecting this secret. Just kidding, that'd be horrible.

Wizards! I must say this post is probably strongly influenced by Movie Knight.

Framing is quite simply the manipulation of context or wording, or even just nearby things, to change how people perceive things. It's almost like a conscious version of classical conditioning, except cognition plays a role in framing where it doesn't in classical conditioning.

Framing's visible in a lot of news. Being the liberal bigotist I am, I'll start off with Fox News.

For example, in this one about the Occupy New York movement, protesters are viewed in an unpleasant light. The first few paragraphs make comparisons between them and circuses to make people visualize them as such. As to whether or not this is an accurate statement isn't the focus here, but rather that they are framed to appear disorderly and generally uncivil. Since the story is about the ruckus they're causing, people will also tend to look for these characteristics in the story, further highlighting those qualities. This makes the rest of the story more convincing, since this framing, along with the audience's probably disparaging inclinations towards the Occupy New York, reinforce each other.

In this one, about Sarah Palin coining the phrase "lamestream media," treats Palin's mistake as though she were a small child. The fourth and fifth paragraphs evidence this most clearly; they examine her logic and assume she put as much thought into it like a small child, and try to make excuses for her mistake, like a small child. This is clearly meant to make the audience think less of Palin, because of both the news article and how they wrote it.

Framing doesn't take much effort, and most people probably at least do some of it without even noticing. It also doesn't mean anything ethically, unless whoever made it made it in such a manner it has strong ethical implications, like in news media, which I've hopefully demonstrated kind of. Framing's in everything, like fairy tales (which would've been a good topic if I wasn't doing that at 1 in the morning), posters (again, good topic), or in advertisements (did I seriously pick the worst possible topic?). It's yet another way people try to influence other people. In fact, I just used it in the previous sentence. In my head I was going through possible verb choices, and some of the other ones I rejected were "manipulate," "control," "command," all of which would have made for a markedly different sentence.

And of course, wizards.

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