ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the way to establish the place of framing research at the core of communications study. After establishing an initial framework, it discusses some critical differences between scholars at the level of theory and method. The chapter presents some of the shifts in the framing resources that have become available to communicators in the information environment that has been transformed so dramatically by developments in networked computing. The emphasis on framing effects as a subset of media effects more generally seems to have been focused primarily within an extremely limited number of cells: the effects of media frames on individual attitudes. This characterization is not intended to ignore the important theoretical and empirical work that has been focused on attempting to understand the mechanisms that operate at the level of cognition. The interpretive work seeks to find the deeper structural connections between frames that operate, perhaps at the level of an ideological core.
