Figure/Ground Analysis

In any given situation, it’s impossible to pay attention to everything. This can be playfully demonstrated in many ways. For example, maybe you’ve seen the “Invisible Gorilla” video.

Black and white drawing that, seen one way, looks like an elegant young woman glancing over her right shoulder, but seen another way looks like an old woman in profile looking down

Viewers are tasked with counting how many times the people wearing white t-shirts pass the ball to each other. But while you pay attention to the ball, you likely miss the person in a gorilla costume walking through the scene. Everyday, every moment, we must ignore some details as we focus on others.

Or maybe you remember seeing the black and white drawing that, seen one way, looks like an elegant young woman glancing over her right shoulder, but seen another way looks like an old woman in profile looking down.

One way to explain this phenomenon is through the terms figure and ground. The things we pay attention to are the figure, and the things we tend to ignore are part of the ground. You can find these terms explored in art and design, as artists play with how to place certain elements in the foreground and others in the background. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan brought the concept of figure/ground to the study of media. He wrote about media environments, and explored how media technologies (which to him was everything from radio and TV to air conditioning and automobiles) create a ground that we often ignore as we pay attention to media messages.

Consider: we open a social media app on our phone and scroll through our newsfeeds, paying attention to the messages our friends have posted, but we don’t really think about what’s going on in the background—the algorithmic decision-making systems that are placing the content in our feeds in a particular order; the wireless access points or satellites that our phones are connecting to that allow us to refresh our feed before we scroll; the cookies that are collecting data on what we click on and “like”; the data brokers that are purchasing that collected data so that they can develop and train new algorithmic decision-making systems that will generate and disseminate targeted content to users like us. All of this is happening in the background, ignored and overlooked, but is effecting our experience of scrolling through our newsfeeds in very real ways. 

McLuhan and the media theorists he inspired believe that we aren’t able to fully understand the media content we experience as figure unless we first really pay attention to the ground of our media environments. In fact, figure/ground is a useful framing tool for us as we think deeply about the social and cultural effects of technologies. Activities that ask us to reverse what is experienced as figure and ground force us to slow down, perhaps requiring us to engage alternative senses, as familiar situations suddenly feel unfamiliar. By shifting our perception and focusing on what often remains in the background, invisible and ignored, we can see technologies in a new way. 

Lessons and Activities

Activity #1. Figure/Ground Analysis of Political Commercials

Lance Mason (2015a) pointed out that “the sensory stimuli of screens overwhelm the senses, making it extremely difficult to reflect on the content while in the midst of a viewing experience” (p. 105). By breaking apart the media parts (e.g., script, video, audio) before experiencing them all together, students can better reflect on how the fast-moving commercial medium influences us in ways that are difficult to perceive. Students can learn from examining most comercially produced commercials, political ads, or TV shows. One particularly poignant political ad for this activity is Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Bear in the Woods” presidential campaign commercial because it relies so much on “feel” and so little on specific messaging. Teachers can play the commercial from The Living Room Candidate website so students do not see text which discloses the video title early. For each of the following steps ask students, what is the message?:

  1. Read the transcript of the commercial (see below)

  2. Watch the video (without audio)

  3. Listen to the audio (without video)

  4. Watch the full commercial

After completing these steps, students can go back through each step analyzing the aspects of the commercials using Mason’s M.I.T.S. questioning framework (see below video). After analyzing the video, students can learn more about the ad from The Living Room Candidate website. Students can then choose other political commercials from the site to analyze.

Political Commercial Text

There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear.

 

Mason, L. E. (2015b). Media literacy: Analyzing political commercials. Social Studies Research and Practice, 10(2), 73-83.

Dan Krutka recently taught this activity to two groups of middle schoolers using the introductory perception examples, the “Bear in the Woods” political ad, and the 2022 “Doja Cat x Taco Bell | The Grande Escape Super Bowl Ad.” You will have to add in the Reagan ad as Dan had it downloaded with the parts broken apart.

Activity #2. Expose common metaphors

We use all sorts of metaphors that smooth over the complexity of various technologies, systems, and processes. By really considering what these metaphors are describing, we are able to surface many details that are often left unexamined in the background. 

For example, “the cloud” is a metaphor that conjures ephemerality, or something brief and fleeting; we save our files “to the cloud,” wherever that is. But “the cloud” is actually a very physical thing. The cloud is comprised of data centers located around the world, which must house all of the data we users store in our cloud accounts. These data centers use up a lot of computing energy and must be cooled, which puts pressure on the water supply of the local community in which these data centers are located. This water usage has generated backlash by many of these local communities. You can see one such example in this NBC report from June 2021.

Ask students to deconstruct the metaphor of “the cloud.” What does this metaphor stand in for? What does “the cloud” conjure in users? What does “the cloud” hide? Answering these questions will require research, during which students will discover many aspects of the hidden ground (background) of the internet. 

Another example is “data exhaust,” which is a metaphor that represents all of the excess data that platforms and companies are able to collect on users, but that have no immediate use. What business practices are hidden by this metaphor? What ideas about the relationship between user-data-platform are embedded in this metaphor? Where does data exhaust hide within common technological systems? For more on this topic, see Forsler and Ciccone, 2021.

Students can also suggest other metaphors to explore. Consider bookending an exploration of a particular system by revisiting a given metaphor. For example, what does “the cloud” mean to students before they do research on data centers, and what does “the cloud” mean after they conduct this research? You can ask students to create artistic pieces—visual art or creative writing—that represent how the meanings of these metaphors have evolved for students through this exploratory process.

Activity #3. Draw a picture of something invisible

To reverse figure and ground, it’s sometimes helpful to begin with an activity that requires you to look at your object of study using different senses than you normally use to interact with it. 

As an example, provide your students this prompt: “Draw a picture of the internet.” Your students may be stumped at first, because in a world of wifi and cloud computing, “the internet” is most often experienced as invisible. What does the internet look like? What are its physical components? Where can you find it? What are its pieces that are important for you to document and depict? For more on this activity, see Forsler and Ciccone, 2021.

Marshall McLuhan encouraged us to engage in multisensory figure/ground explorations, so this activity can be broadened by asking students to represent the internet via sound, scent, movement, or material creations.

You can use this activity for any number of “invisible” technologies that function in the background. For example, ask your students to draw a picture of an “algorithm,” “streaming,” or “data.” The purpose is that making concrete and visible something that is experienced as invisible forces us to more closely consider the details of these invisibilized systems that we tend to ignore.

Activity #4. Articulate how a technology works

Teachers can start by asking students: “When you are sitting in this classroom, how are you able to connect to the internet?” In wifi connected classrooms, students will need to think about how wifi works, and will start looking for wireless access points mounted on the ceilings or walls. Or they may peer out the windows, looking for cell towers. Connecting to the internet is often an instantaneous process, but by slowing down that process to consider how connecting to the internet actually is able to happen, students will need to consider the physical objects and invisible processes that make this possible. (For more on this prompt, see Forsler & Ciccone, 2021.)

You can also use this prompt to explore how other kinds of technologies work, for example, “How does the TikTok For You page (FYP) work?” or “How does this piece of edtech learn what academic skills you need to work on?” These prompts will require additional research, as students will need to consider what data a platform has access to and collects, how algorithms make recommendations, which of our actions provide useful or actionable information for these algorithms, and more. It may be helpful for students to create a flow chart that maps out how a technology takes certain inputs to create certain outputs (which helps students to consider the 3rd critical question about technology: What does the technology need?). Considering how a technology works slows down the user experience and surfaces invisible processes that most often stay in the background.

Activity #5. Articulate the effects of a technology

This activity offers another way of considering the 4th critical question about technology: What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by the technology? There are certain effects or changes that are very intentional, obvious, and visible, but there are other effects or changes that are less obvious, or even hidden. Marshall McLuhan encouraged us to consider how our senses are altered or extended by new technologies—we can use this as inspiration to ask students: How does this technology affect what or how you see, what or how you hear, to what or how you pay attention? It is also essential that students consider: How does this technology affect other people or things that aren’t you?

One example is the Amazon Ring doorbell. To identify the intended and obvious effects of this technology, you can watch commercials created by Ring and ask students why their family may have purchased this product or another one like it. Next, teachers can ask students to consider the less obvious and perhaps unintended effects or changes that a product like the Amazon Ring doorbell has on communities and neighborhoods, an individual’s sense of safety, expectations of surveillance, the role of law enforcement, and more. The 10/24/21 episode of The Sunday Show with Evan Selinger and Chris Gilliard can help your students to identify many of these less obvious and more hidden effects and changes. Students can represent these obvious and less obvious effects through the visual of the iceberg: the obvious effects form just the tip of the iceberg, and all of these less obvious effects of a piece of technology represent all of the ways in which technologies touch people, ideas, and our environments and communities in unexpected ways.

Activity #6. Identify what a technology is made of

So many of the technologies we use today seem like a literal “black box”—you can’t see inside, so you don’t know what these technologies are made of. In fact, it might even feel like they aren’t made of anything real at all. One simple way to disrupt this way of thinking is actually opening up a piece of technology and seeing what’s inside. For example, take a laptop that no longer works and remove the back panel. What’s in there? What does the motherboard look like, and what materials is it made out of? Where is the heatsink and how does it cool down the device? How do the insides of different laptops look different, and how do those differences allow those laptops to operate differently? 

Once students get a sense of what certain technologies are made of, they can start to think about the process that a particular piece of technology took to end up in their hands. Students can trace these supply chains over the course of the lifecycle of the device. Taking the iPhone as an example, the production of an iPhone begins with the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is assembled in factories in China, and ends up as e-waste in southeast Asia. (This New York Times article from 2019 is just one account of the problem of e-waste.) 

By tracing supply chains and lifecycles, students will consider not just the materials of these technologies but also the humans around the world that assemble and disassemble consumer technologies. In this way, it becomes clear that these supply chains have social costs and human rights implications.

Activity #7. Talk back to an advertisement to articulate what’s not being said

Once students begin to learn about the hidden ground of technologies—how they work, their hidden effects, the journeys they take to get to us—students will be able to identify what’s not being said in the marketing materials for these popular technologies. Students can engage in a variety of media-making activities that allow them to “talk back” to these advertisements and articulate what is being left unsaid or even purposefully hidden.

Forsler & Ciccone (2021) describe one example of this type of activity. Students selected an ad for a Google product and, using a video annotation tool, inserted annotations in places where the ad is not being transparent about the user data that is being collected or the way in which user data makes the product work the way it does. This “talking back” to an ad demonstrates an understanding of the hidden ground both of a particular ad and the technology being advertised. 

Activity #8. Break down the impacts of a technology or policy through role playing

In Marshall McLuhan’s 1977 book City as Classroom, he and his coauthors suggest a role playing activity where students put Henry Ford on trial for the invention of the automobile. They recommend hearing testimony from various stakeholders, including the workers in the Ford factories, the company’s public relations team, gas-station attendants, used-car dealers, town planners, law enforcement, doctors who treat patients who are involved in car accidents, and government regulators. The goal of this type of activity is to surface all of the different kinds of effects of a technology, and to consider all of the various people in society who are impacted in some way. This type of role playing activity helps students consider the 2nd critical question about technology: Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?

You can borrow this role playing activity idea and apply it to any technology. You can also use this idea to explore a complex technology-related policy. One example of this is net neutrality. The repeal of federal net neutrality regulations in 2017 got a lot of attention on social media, so net neutrality is a topic that a lot of people have heard of but maybe don’t understand the details of. As described in Forsler & Ciccone (2021), in this role playing activity students will represent one of four relevant perspectives: CEO of Comcast, CEO of Netflix, the founder of a fictitious start-up video streaming service dubbed Vidz4U and an internet user/customer. Via the activity, the specific components of net neutrality are offered one by one. Students discuss with their group mates what the “character” they are representing thinks about each regulatory component. You can find a more detailed explanation and links to the materials for this activity here. 

Activity #9. Future visions via science fiction

By presenting different possible futures, science fiction is able to draw attention to things we may not be paying close attention to in our world today. For example, the short film Hyper-Reality by Keiichi Matsuda envisions a hyper-personalized, hyper-stimulating, augmented reality-dependent near-future. A piece of science fiction like Hyper-Reality can serve as a catalyst to launch an exploration of what is gained or enhanced, and what might be lost, by particular future visions. 

What are some other activities or techniques for reversing figure and ground when thinking about technologies with students? Use our contact page to share your lesson you would like to add to this page.

References

Damico, N., & Krutka, D. G. (2018). Social media diaries and fasts: Educating for digital mindfulness with pre-service teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 73, 109-119.

Forsler, I., & Ciccone, M. (2021). Making visible the invisible: Exploring McLuhan’s figure/ground in digital citizenship education. Explorations in Media Ecology, 20(4), 437-455.

Mason, L. E. (2015a). Analyzing the hidden curriculum of screen media advertising. The Social Studies, 106(3), 104-111.

Mason, L. E. (2015b). Media literacy: Analyzing political commercials. Social Studies Research and Practice, 10(2), 73-83.