Framing: Topic, Time, and Place

It's interesting to note that although both Musgrave’s and Dauterman’s narratives portray them as successful, engaged computer users (discussed in Performance section), both women’s earliest memories of computer use are characterized by spatial barriers to their access: the location of the computer in a confined space at a relative’s house in Musgrave’s case and the location of Dauterman’s home computer in a scary part of the house where she was afraid to go alone. In this context, the use of a frame-within-frame allows Musgrave and Dauterman to tell a mini-narrative that runs slightly counter to the overall story of their DALN narratives. Bateson theorizes that this kind of frames-within-frames structure—like Musgrave’s and Dauterman’s mini-narratives recalling physical barriers to childhood computer use—helps people control the action found in a narrative.

Building on his idea that narrative frames give both speaker and audience a set of parameters within which to make meaning, Bateson argues that interlocking frames which provide interpretative strategies help give the narrator a feeling of control over the story and its interpretation, creating subsets of directions that shape how the story is told and understood (188). It may be the case that telling stories that show their early faltering steps with computers as children at the beginning of their narratives allows Musgrave and Dauterman to position these early experiences as part of a technological literacy learning trajectory which shows them growing into increasingly competent, confident computer users by the end of their narratives. These DALN narrators use the convention of opening successive narrative frames according to the time and place where the memories occurred, setting these individual events within the larger interpretive context of the technological literacy narrative. The obstacles to computer use described in Musgrave’s and Dauterman’s early frames-within-frames suggest that they negotiated early computer access difficulties successfully and have gone on to become proficient computer users, enabling them to represent themselves in their full narratives as users who have overcome obstacles and whose access and attitudes toward computers have changed over time.