why 'frame studies'?

context and backstory to the upcoming project

Hands Framing New York Harbor (John Baldessari, 1971)

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Grant Allen, 1894

I hated school as a kid. This isn’t a particularly unique origin story, but it’s the truth of my experience. I think a lot of is because I had first experienced what real learning could be like, as a self-directed nerd carrying stacks of books out of libraries every week. I wanted a real education, and school seemed indifferent, if not outright hostile, to genuine curiosity. So even when I was done with school, I felt this strong compulsion to pursue a real education. I designed a curriculum for myself– physics! history! literature!– and read like my life depended on it. I also wrote a lot online, in part because it just seemed obvious to me that you don’t really know what you know until you engage with others about it, and have your ideas tested in the crucible of conflict. Also, since I wasn’t going to university, so I was determined to ‘make up for it’ by seeking out intellectual stimulation anywhere I could find it. Looking back, I’m quite proud of how I spent my ‘errant’ youth, and my only wish is that I could have gone even harder, without all the tedious guilt and shame that I inherited from my social environment for daring to be self-directed without any credentials.

I got my first job via my blog where I’d been writing thoughtful commentary about local news and politics. Prior to that I was also playing in a band, and selling t-shirts, each of which I feel taught me more about life and the world than school did. Particularly I think I learned things like sales and marketing, which school is especially bad at teaching, because there’s little room for persuasion to be fruitful in an environment that’s fundamentally coercive. I’ve heard some stories of clever little exceptions here and there, but for the most part, creativity isn’t rewarded in an environment modelled on standardized testing. The fact that people go to school and then inherit a standardized-test model-of-the-world is something that strikes me as a casually normalized crime against humanity. Many people conflate test results (and other accolades) with moral worth, which I believe is related to why people take rejection in dating so personally, rather than see it as a neutral (let alone positive) outcome. I used to arguing my case about this very passionately, and I did change some people’s minds over time, but looking back I now see that I approached this from a place of wretched neediness. Why?

I think when I was younger and didn’t yet have any real success to speak of, I was terminally anxious about proving the validity of my perspective. Because if I were wrong, then it would mean that I had failed a very fundamental test of what it means to be a functional member of society. It would imply that I had deviated from the norm in an unfruitful way, which is something that losers and failures do, and those people end up miserable, lonely, undesirable, you name it. I now see the humor in the recursion: even as I was railing against the futility of tests, I was still indoctrinated about tests as a way of determining moral worth. I think some of the complexity there was– even if I didn’t personally buy into it, I knew that everybody else around me did. Laws and money are both technically fictitious (people made them up!), and yet saying “fuck off, I don’t believe in that made up stuff” doesn’t get you very far if you want to be a functional member of society. And when you’re young, it’s hard to have a strong sense of self, because you don’t really know anything yet, and you’re quite hopelessly dependent on the people around you in a myriad of ways. Self-actualizing beyond that takes time, and can be a painful, tedious, lonely process.

Anyway. All of this is really preamble for talking about Frame Studies, ie, let’s talk about the current era of my writing, the name of my substack, etc.

I published my first book Friendly Ambitious Nerd in 2020, and my second book Introspect in 2022. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s next. The ‘easy’ thing to do would have been to focus on what was already working: update the books, do more marketing around them, go on podcasts about them, write essays about them and around them. I’ll probably still do this eventually, but I’ve basically chosen to make things more complicated for myself by trying to figure out a ‘separate’ thing entirely. Well– it’s not ENTIRELY separate because pretty much all of my works are related– one way or another, they’re all about human flourishing, or you could say they’re all about addressing the ways in which we are miseducated. (Did I mention that I hated school?)

I’m Singaporean. Here are two facts about Singaporeans.

1. Singaporeans are widely known to have some of the best test scores in the world. We consistently hit #1 for Mathematics, Science and Reading on the PISA.

2. Singaporeans are the juiciest scam targets on the planet, losing more money on average than anybody else.

I believe these two facts are directly related. Part of (2) is that we’re rich, but I think the more interesting part is that we’re also gullible. We contort ourselves into obeying authority, which allows us to optimize tremendously for passing tests, but this means that we’re also susceptible to submit to anything that looks authoritative. As a result we are simultaneously the smartest and dumbest people on the planet. We lack street-smarts, because time spent on the streets is time not spent grinding out better test scores.

Alright, I’ve digressed twice now. Again, I’m really just contextualizing why I care so much about ‘proper education’ (which I think is something that has to happen in a ‘full-stack’ way, ecologically, within-and-without, as-above-so-below, etc.) I feel that I was miseducated.

So… what does a proper education look like?

This is something that’s very difficult to distill into a simple phrase or sentence. Even if I were capable of doing a good job of it, it would nevertheless be promptly misunderstood. With that caveat out of the way, let’s try to sketch a shabby, hasty portrait. Education is really a dynamic (as opposed to static) process. It’s about tending to the ecology of one’s needs, interests, desires, responsibilities, obligations. It’s about managing tensions and conflicts. It’s about collaboration, with others as well as with oneself.

Many of my favorite educators in the broadest sense focus on specific subjects in a narrow sense (music, sport, art, etc), because it’s far easier to get someone to see the bigger picture from the little picture than the other way around. It turns out that if you pursue anything earnestly and seriously enough, you eventually run into all sorts of complications, have to learn to manage your psychology, and you’ll even have to do actual philosophy. I often point at this great post from a kitchen knife forum – “the hardest thing about this hobby is figuring out your own preferences.” The hardest thing in music is to really listen. The hardest thing in sports is to really pay attention to what’s happening. If you wanted to improve your tennis serve or your jump shot in basketball, you have to pay very careful, non-judgemental attention to how your body is moving, and what the result of that movement is. And how everyone else is moving, and so on.

Ding Liren’s championship-losing blunder at the World Chess Championship 2024

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of chess. I consider myself a casual player, I still make silly blunders quite often. I’ve made some amount of effort to to analyze and study the games that I’ve lost, but I haven’t been super proactive about it. And I notice that I flinch quite a bit. When I lose games, it’s often because I made moves impulsively without taking a moment to pause and think through my options, and to see what my opponent’s response might be to any particular move I make. I’d bet that someone could get to over 1000 ELO, maybe even 1500 ELO, simply by being very dedicated to thinking through their moves. And the interesting thing here to me is that this seems to be more of an emotional challenge than an intellectual one. It’s not that we lack the firepower to figure things out, but we lack the will to use our firepower appropriately, adeptly.

This general class of problem is a big part of why I wrote Introspect first. It’s hard to make progress on anything if you’re emotionally or psychologically blocked in a way that actively impedes progress. It’s hard to learn anything if learning is scary, and painful, and makes you feel stupid and less-than, rather than excited and energized. And to some degree I’m noticing that I may have been flinching from really getting to work on Frame Studies properly because part of me feels like I’m not qualified. If I’m still flinching in my work and even in my play, what right do I have to discuss the art of wielding one’s firepower adeptly?

But having really thought about it– and I’ve put off thinking about it for quite some time– I realize this itself is a kind of safety ritual, to protect me from getting hurt. The traffic lights will never all be green, the conditions will never be perfect. If I want to express this well, but I cannot yet, I must then concede that I will first express it less-than-well. And many of the ways in which I will be wrong, are ways that will not be obvious to me inside my own head. I flinch from the idea of posting bad-and-wrong essays. Wouldn’t that diminish my credibility and make it harder for me to do my life’s work?

In the short run, maybe yes, but when I give myself space to consider it, I realize that, well, if I find out that anything is bad-and-wrong I can simply acknowledge it, issue corrections, update, learn, improve. This is the kind of thing that only becomes apparent when I do give myself space to consider it, and in a way that’s a huge part of what Frame Studies is about: if we want alternate ways of seeing, if we want to ‘escape the matrix’ of our own tunnel vision, we can’t really pursue that in a frantic, grabby, anxious way. We have to relax into it. We have to become playful, even outright silly and frivolous. It’s been widely noted that would-be opportunists flinch from opportunity because it shows up dressed like work. I think that’s true, and I’d further add that I think people flinch even more when opportunity shows up dressed like frivolity.

Anyway.

what is literacy really?

Sometimes I describe Introspect as ‘a self-help book for people who are allergic to self-help books.’ I could similarly describe Frame Studies as ‘essays about media literacy for people who are allergic to the concept media literacy.’ Maybe let’s quickly rant about literacy? So, we can largely assume that loads of people know how to read and write, at a basic level. They can write their own names. They can read a sentence and know what the words in it mean. You read “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” and you hallucinate a mental image– maybe with vivid visuals, maybe not– of one mammal physically hopping over another. Pretty straightforward. “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” You get it. But things get much more complicated than that. I’m tragically running out of steam just when things are starting to get a bit exciting, but I can quote a Note that I posted a while ago, that I feel describes a ‘higher-order literacy’:

It rhymes a little with what I was saying about chess. The first thing to learn in chess is how the pieces move. Then you play your first game, and if you’re playing against someone who knows how to play, you will almost definitely lose, because you’ll likely be fixated on the moves that you want to make, and fail to properly notice what your opponent is doing. Similarly, ‘higher order literacy’ in a broader sense is not just about knowing ‘how the pieces move’, (what individual words technically mean), but developing a sense of why pieces are moved, what constitutes a strong move or a weak move, what sacrifices are worth making, and so on.

What to expect:

I have a lot more to say but I think I should wrap this up, so I’ll close by talking about some of the things I want to talk about this year:

1. Wretchedness – I want to reintroduce this old concept because I think it’s a useful one. It’s tied up in the emotional problems I was talking about earlier. People who have suffered in some ways who then anticipate more suffering, accumulate resentment and hostility, towards both others and themselves, bite the hands that feed them, reinforce their pessimistic view of the world, etc

2. CDs – I want to discuss the rise and fall of the Compact Disc as a medium, significantly because I am a media nerd who grew up with CDs, and/but also because I think it’ll be a great vehicle for discussing all sorts of other ideas. I’m also eager to discuss my past experience as a musician. Also I might use this post to discuss TED talks (the first TED talk was about CDs!), or maybe that might be a separate post, I’ve gone back and forth about this. I have too many draft ideas floating around so I should probably try to consolidate ideas for now.

3. McLuhan’s Understanding Media – I’m a bit shy to say this explicitly but I kind of think of Frame Studies as me trying to pick up where Marshall McLuhan left off. I think he was tuned in to a bunch of really important things about the nature of media that more people ought to understand. I’m kind of tempted to do a chapter-by-chapter analysis. Trying to do justice to the whole book in one post feels overwhelming. There are many parts that I still don’t quite understand, like his whole ‘hot vs cold’ idea. But I suppose it would be worthwhile even if I just list out all of the quotes that really resonated with me.

4. Movies – one of the big things I want to do with Frame Studies is discuss actual media, by which I mean write literal book and movie and tv reviews. The movie I most want to discuss is Inception, which I feel is a very Frame-Studies-coded movie.(Poe: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream). I similarly want to write about Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix, though I don’t know if I have as much to say about those things. I have a draft titled “Follow The White Rabbit”, which references both films, and I think it might want to be more of post about references and shibboleths etc in general.

Ha, I love how writing these out actually got me talking about another element that I haven’t brought up yet, and wasn’t sure how I was gonna bring up. Another way I think about Frame Studies, apart from the McLuhanesque examining of the frames through which we experience and consume media, is… straightforwardly about project management. One of the reasons I’ve been taking so long with these essays is I haven’t quite figured out how I want to frame them. And I was really hung up on, “if you’re writing about framing, you better frame your writing well!”, and then fell into a tar pit of perfectionism. And I languished in there for years, it seems. But it’s funny, recursive and true that I then still need to ‘frame my way out’ of that problem! And for me personally, I think that might be the winning frame that I’ve been looking for. I get that this might be confusing to read because I’m using the word ‘frame’ a lot. Let me try and approach it differently…

basically, there’s a lot of different things I could write, a lot of different approaches I could take. I got quite swept up in the idea of doing ‘important work’, something that ‘really matters’, in some vague abstract sense for ‘my readers’. This seems to be a recurring trap that I fall into periodically. Then part of me starts to feel frustrated, like I’m being pressured into something I didn’t sign up for, and I get the feeling of I don’t wanna! But there’s another part of me that does wanna. So there’s this internal conflict, and if I don’t manage that effectively, it becomes a little unpleasant to live inside my head, much like it would be unpleasant to live in a house where people are either arguing loudly, or otherwise giving each other a tense silent treatment.

And ultimately I think what is the way out for me, is to focus on framings that are personally helpful to me, rather than fussing over what would be helpful to everyone else, and trust that what’s helpful to me will be helpful to at least some other people. Put your own life mask on first, etc etc.

I have more to say about everything.

That’s always been true and will probably always be true. And the challenge for me then, with my hundreds of drafts and notes, is to find the frames that allow me to express good-enough ideas, well-enough, often-enough, in a way that lets me feel like I’m part of a lively, dynamic on-going process, rather than struggling to keep up with self-imposed deadlines.

If I can solve that framing problem for myself, I’m sure it will be a blessing to my friends and readers, even if I’m not lecturing them about it. All I have to do is demonstrate the joy of a good frame. And then do that again. And again. See you in the next one!