One of the first things I really absorbed from working at the GII was the power of the frame. Like most people, I had used framing in two ways: often selectively ignoring it because I wanted to throw rhetorical bombs at my opponents as opposed to connect with new publics, and otherwise instinctively obeying the framing doctrine without really thinking too hard about it.

When I began to look at the GII's own early research and those of other framing and messaging wizards like George Lakoff and Susan Bales at Frame Works Institute, I began to better understand how accomplished communicators can navigate frames to achieve their goals.

The first framing lesson that really got me here was that old saw, the earth-from-space. We use a quote from some Arabian Prince/astronaut about how once he could see the Earth from space, without all the political boundaries that keep us fighting, he recognized that the reasons for that fighting didn't really have meaning. The image of the Earth from space is one that cane be carefully employed to make people better understand how we are all interconnected, even though it sounds like hippie trash talk.

To that end, I track on meaningful images that connect us to the world around us. And at the end of the year, I browse the almost limitless selection of Top Ten and Best Of lists, because Americans love lists, and I am nothing if not American.

Space remains a valuable source of potentially humbling frame-enabling images. This year, the BadAstronomy.com blog has collected the Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007, and they are fabulous. The photo above is number 7 on the list, The Lover's Embrace of Arp 87:

Arp 87 is the name given to the system of two galaxies, NGC 3808A and NGC 3808B. They passed each other just as the age of dinosaurs was starting to get going on Earth, 200 million years ago. The gravity of B (the cigar-shaped galaxy on the left) drew out a long tentacle from the much larger A (the spiral on the right), and it appears as if the passage also wrapped the tendril around B, perhaps more than once. It’s also possible the tendril flared out, separating into streams that only appear to entwine the smaller galaxy.