Framing: Topic, Time, and Place

Lanning uses an introductory frame to open his narrative with a clear focus, demonstrating a tacit understanding of the type of orienting preamble Heath describes. His opening line—“I’m going to tell you about my first computer experience”—states the topic of his story explicitly. This introduction is designed to make his story accessible to an audience by providing them with a topic statement that explains its context. To explain how introductions like Lanning’s work, anthropologist Gregory Bateson describes how people use "frames" both to organize their experience and to communicate it to others. For Bateson, frames provide a “premise” for interpreting the stories they contain, directing the audience to pay special attention to aspects of the content like style, perspective, subject, and genre (187). Bateson argues that the frame—not the content itself—is what tells viewers to interpret the content as art (or here, personal narrative) which requires a special kind of interpretation.