Network-Activated Frames (NAF), Redefining Framing in a New Digital Era

ARUGUETE NATALIA

Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation

Springer

Año: 2019; p. 1 - 6

Framing has been approached, from different paradigms of communication, as a privileged tool for the production, circulation and reproduction of socially shared and persistent meanings over time (Reese, 2001). The constructionist perspective conceived Framing as an integral and dynamic process of construction of social reality. As described by these researchers, the mass media, its communicators, governments and the public, co-construct coherent ways of understanding the world within the framework of a culture that shapes the collective memory of a society (Van Gorp, 2007). Until the advent of digital media and social networks, existing analyses focused on the ability of interpretative frames to activate and propagate in a stratified communication system. Frames delivered by the government, it is said, pass through a network of nonadministrative elites and continue through news companies and their publications, settling in the public's perception schemes. As in a waterfall, each stage of communication contributes to the mixing and flow of ideas, interpretations, and definitions of reality (Entman, 2004). In social networks, however, the messages flow dynamically, not according to the stratified logic just described. This dynamic path creates filter bubbles (Parisier, 2017) inside of which unique combinations of frame elements are forged. Bubbles circulate and reproduce information consistent with the underlying worldview of virtual users, who live in the same community. As a result, there is little room for the coexistence of interpretative frameworks that do not maintain a cultural and cognitive congruence.