Framing: Topic, Time, and Place

For Lanning, Johnston, and Springer, the act of announcing that they are telling a technological literacy narrative demonstrates that they know how to tell a story and invites the audience quickly into the central meaning of their narrative by identifying the topic. These introductions also provide the audience with frames that give meaning to the recollections contained within the narratives. These frames tell the audience that the speakers are not merely listing past events but rather are narrating their most memorable or most representative recollections of computer use in order to create representations of their identities relative to technology. Furthermore, the location of these narratives in the DALN also gives these firsthand accounts a documentary historical weight, a way of preventing what Aleida Assman calls “contemporary history”—narrated by those who have experienced it—from passing into “remote history"—narratives which can only be reconstructed by researchers without firsthand experience of the phenomenon (271). In light of the DALN’s mission to create “a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors,” these narratives serve as snapshots of near-contemporary literacy practices which—together with other narratives—tell the story, or at least a story, of literacy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (DALN Homepage). In light of the narratives’ location within the DALN, an introduction which explains that the creators will be recounting their early memories of computer use lends weight to their experience. In this sense, the narrative introductions help construct the mosaic of literacy practices represented in the DALN.

Sociologist Erving Goffman suggests that speech within a certain narrative frame—like the technological literacy narrative—involves an interplay between rehearsed performance and off-the-cuff storytelling, and that rehearsed and off-the-cuff performance in a single speech event can be organized using discursive frames-within-frames (511). Specifically, frames-within-frames are constructed using statements that situate each recollection within the narrative as a whole, such as locating it in a time or place. In these technological literacy narratives, frames-within-frames function as Goffman-style conventionalized speech performances while also performing the narrative function of relating a specific memory to the overarching narrative frame of memories of computer use. Framing memories according to their temporal and physical locations shows the extent to which recollections of these experiences are tied to life stages (childhood) and particular places (home and school) where the narrators interacted with computers.