Conclusion: Technology Literacy Narratives' Relevance to Education

The layers of this three-stage process illustrate what Selfe and the DALN Consortium call the rhetoricity of literacy narratives: “We can’t say, in short, that these narratives contribute evidence of literacy practices or values as they exist, but rather that they are, as Linda Brodkey points out, cultural artifacts of literacy” (“Rhetorical Responsiveness”). Viewing these literacy narratives as cultural artifacts highlights the ways the authors use framing, details, relational positioning, and paralinguistic performance to represent their technological literacy experiences to themselves and to their audience. These dimensions draw attention to the extent to which understandings of literacy—even when they’re located in the past—are always changing because of the new perspective from which the narrator views them. Doubly re-contextualizing technological literacy experience through narrative and then through comparative analysis of these narratives in their local, historical, and social context holds the promise of offering students a new and valuable perspective on their own and as well as their generation’s technological literacy experiences. Using, for example, the four features analyzed in the group of narratives from this exhibit, students could be invited to consider how the conventions of framing, details, relationships, and performance construct the narrators’ identities based on their technology experiences and how these narratives relate to and differ from their own experience. Discussion and reflection topics could take up some of the conclusions drawn from this subset of DALN narratives:

• Framing: How does the premise provided by a technological literacy narrative frame shape the way the audience interprets the content of the narrative? How do content aspects of the narratives—such as their settings in space and time—reflect the interaction between the specific material and experiential aspects of technology experience and the narrative conventions of the technological literacy story? How can these frames be read as locating individual narrators in specific historically- and socially-situated technological ecologies?
• Details: How do details work to describe the story world in these narratives? What do these details communicate about the material and social conditions surrounding technology in the narrators’ experiences? Within what culturally canonical accounts of technology experience do the details provided in these literacy narratives locate their speakers?
• Relationships: What peer, family, and school technology resources are represented in these narratives? How do the authors suggest that different social contexts of technological literacy have shaped their relationships with technologies in the past and present? What connections does the narrator seem to make between the social environment surrounding their technology use and the attitude toward technology they adopt in the narrative?
• Performance: What does the performance of the narratives—especially the authors’ paralinguistic cues and the metadata information the narrators choose to include—say about the relationship the narrators draw between themselves and technology? Are there traces of specific genres of performance (like the deviant adolescent or the audience-savvy vlogger) which link the narrators to other canonical and canonically exceptional accounts of technological literacy among their birth cohort?