Details: Immediacy and Authenticity

In addition to the use of descriptive detail, the DALN contributors also create a reality effect for their audience by incorporating referential details into their stories. In almost all of the narratives, the contributors refer to and describe specific computer activities they used to engage in, many going so far as to name the specific programs they used. Providing detailed information about childhood computer gaming adds another degree of verisimilitude and authenticity to the narrators’ provision of concrete details, because it keys into the familiar idea of children who grew up during the 1990s playing computer games. As Selfe explains, the development and consumption of computer games for children was part of the technological literacy agenda promoted by government, industry, schools, and parents during the 1990s:

Following the cultural narrative of “the good parent, the providing parent,” parents have been asked to assume responsibility for providing early training in technological literacy for their children. In general, this training has taken two forms: first, parents have been encouraged to provide home computers to their children as early as possible in their developmental history; second, they have been encouraged to introduce children to an officially informed version of technological literacy. (Technology and Literacy 99)

As Mizuko Ito explains in his cultural history of children’s computer games, educational software became one of the main ways for parents to satisfy their “responsibility” to provide their children with the technological literacy tools seen as necessary to succeed academically and professionally:

educational software appeals to parents’ desire for wholesome, creative, and interactive play for their children that will give them a leg up on subjects covered in school. These products appeal to the middle-class parenting approach that Lareau (2003) describes as “concerted cultivation,” in which children’s time outside school is occupied with “productive” forms of play. (44)

Although most of these narratives lack metadata about the socio-economic class of their creators, the home computer environments several narrators describe point to a middle- or possibly upper-class childhood in which parents provided their children with home computers and educational computer games. Despite the fact that scholars’ thinking about the Digital Divide has grown nuanced beyond a binary approach that focuses on physical access to computers, John Scenters-Zapico argues that real, material differences in access persist and often remain drawn along socio-economic lines (200-203). In contrast to the access barriers Scenters-Zapico’s poor students recall, the narratives in this exhibit that describe childhood home computer use fall into the middle class narratives of parent technology provision that Selfe and Ito describe.