Framing: Topic, Time, and Place

In addition to offering the creators a way to structure and present their experience, the frames-within-frames Anonymous, Musgrave, and Dauterman use can help viewers put these experiences in their historical and social context. In particular, the narrators’ spatial and temporal framing of their earliest computer memories stands out for audience members looking for connections between the conditions these narratives describe and the uneven distribution of computer access during the 1990s. In their studies of the early use of computers in college writing instruction, Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe note that through the mid-1990s, “computer technology continued to be unevenly distributed in [K-12] school districts and systems—usually along lines of race, class, and gender” (256). In light of these material conditions for technology access, describing the kind of computer access and activities available at their schools seems to offer narrators like Anonymous a way to position herself on the continuum Hawisher et al. describe.

With regard to home computer use during the 1990s, Selfe explains in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century that during the mid- and late 1990s, increasing numbers of parents were buying home computers to support their children’s technological literacy development “at the level of the family’s daily lived experiences” (99, 112). However, home computers were still—and are still—distributed unevenly along the lines Hawisher et al describe, so the framing Musgrave and Dauterman use to emphasize the presence, location, and conditions of access to the home computers they used as children allows the audience to position the two women in the private technological ecologies Selfe describes developing gradually throughout the 1990s. The spatial and temporal frames these narrators use connect their experiences within memorable times and places in their own lives, but for viewers interested in placing these stories in their wider social context, these narrators’ framing devices locate their experiences with technology in specific conditions of the changing home and school technology environments of the 1990s.