Details: Immediacy and Authenticity

In their narratives, the authors include specific details about place and time that serve to create a "reality effect" for their audiences. Especially when they come in the form of concrete, specific information about the place where the memory took place and the activities they engaged in there, details about time and place help narrators and viewers (re)imagine the situation. As narrative theorist Jerome Bruner explains, details in stories do not provide “ordinary verification”—factual accuracy—but rather they create an impression of “verisimilitude, lifelikeness” (28). According to compositionist and ethnographer Linda Brodkey,

One studies stories not because they are true or even because they are false, but for the same reason that people tell and listen to them, in order to learn about the terms on which others makes sense of their lives: what they take into account and what they do not; what they consider worth contemplating and what they do not; what they are and are not willing to raise and discuss as problematic and unresolved in life. (47)

Attending to the details that the DALN narrators use offers a way to follow Brodkey’s advice to learn about the ways this group of students constructs their technological literacy experience. Analyzing the ways in which several of the narrators elaborate on their computer memories by naming specific computer games they grew up playing allows the audience to link their stories to a paradigm of technology use that emphasizes computer game play as one of the hallmarks of childhood computer experience.

Providing concrete details offers a way for the audience to re-enter a memory along with the speaker. In theorizing how trauma narrators draw in and affect their audiences, literary scholar Patricia Yaeger explains how Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo uses evocative, descriptive details like the feeling of chewing rotten leaves and the taste of a juicy orange to dramatize her memories of Auschwitz and draw the audience into the scenes Delbo recreates in her memoir (400). It is these moments of constructed verisimilitude, Yaeger argues, that encourage the audience to fall into Delbo’s narrative. Although dealing with very different subject matter, the DALN narrators draw on the same technique Delbo does, providing concrete, evocative details which help their audience enter into the technology memories they narrate.