Details: Immediacy and Authenticity

As Selfe and Hawisher explain in their introduction to Literate Lives in the Information Age, birth cohorts—age-based peer groups—have particular relevance when discussing people's experiences with technology. Due to the rapid pace of technological change, the experiences of different generations vary greatly because the technologies and material conditions of technology access differ radically even over short spans of time (9). The narrators grew up under the influence of the 1990s technological literacy agenda Selfe describes as

an official national project to expand technological literacy [which] has been launched in America’s schools, homes, and workplaces, changing the ways in which both literacy educators and the public they serve think about, value, and practice literacy. […] This project aims to create a citizenry comfortable in using computers not only for the purposes of calculating, programming, and designing but also for the purposes of reading, writing, and communicating. (Technology 5)

As these narratives demonstrate—and as Selfe and Hawisher also note—different birth cohorts are defined and define themselves according to their familiarity with different technologies, a characteristic that manifests itself in these narratives though name-dropping specific computer programs (9). The contrast Selfe and Hawisher draw between the Cobol/Fortran/Pascal/Basic generation of the 1970s and early 1980s and the WordPerfect/PageMaker/HyperCard generation of the late 1980s also distinguishes both of them from the Oregon Trail/Math Munchers/Tetris/Warcraft generation to which these narrators belong (9).

As demonstrated by the prominence of references to familiar computer places and activities in these narratives, embedded concrete details create a reality effect that connects these narrators’ experiences of technology to their birth-cohort, simultaneously animating their stories and making them more relatable for an audience of their peers by aligning themselves with a culturally canonical account of childhood technology use. Similar to the use of time and place to frame scenes within these narratives, the contributors’ use of details about their early memories of computers can be read as locating themselves within larger trends of computer use shared by their generation. Recognizing and drawing out these commonalities can help viewers ground individual narrators’ experience in the birth cohorts Selfe and Hawisher describe. Keying into birth cohorts by noting how local narratives play into culturally canonical narratives also opens a space for discussion of different or uncanonical experiences (highlighted in the next section) by encouraging an examination of how students’ individual experiences with technology intersect and/or clash with their peers’ and with narratives of typical childhood interactions with computers.