CONCEPT
The Framing Battle
Juma's name for the contest between competing narratives that determines how an innovation will be understood, evaluated, and governed — a struggle whose outcome shapes institutional responses more than any technical characteristic of the innovation itself.
Juma identified two dominant frames that recur across every innovation transition: the threat frame articulating opposition in terms of public values (safety, tradition, quality) and the progress frame articulating support in terms of universal values (efficiency, access, democratization). Both frames capture a portion of reality and conceal the rest. Both mobilize constituencies. The contest between them — documented across centuries of evidence — determines not whether the innovation is adopted (innovations delivering genuine value are always adopted eventually) but the institutional environment within which adoption occurs. The framing battle is not a philosophical debate. It is a political contest that determines institutional outcomes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The threat frame invokes a hierarchy that places the existing arrangement above the innovation on every dimension that matters: natural ice is purer than artificial cold, hand-written code is more reliable than machine-generated code, butter is more wholesome than margarine. The frame's power derives from selective accuracy — it identifies