Performance: Paralinguistic Cues, Metadata, and Identity

The noticeably expressive movements Musgrave makes with her face and head while narrating this mini-episode set it apart from the rest of her narrative and may indicate that this part of her story interests her most or that it best describes her current feelings about and use of computers. Musgrave’s self-representation as a slightly deviant computer user fits into Bruner’s “canonical exceptionality” narrative technique:

a story (to meet the criterion of tellability) must violate canonical expectancy, but do so in a way that is culturally comprehensible. That is to say, it must be a violation of the folk-psychologically canonical that is itself canonical—that is, the breach of convention must itself be conventional. (30)

Her junior-high experience with technology allows Musgrave to represent herself as a young adult who first began using computers for social networking as an adolescent, a culturally canonical narrative of home exposure to technology and its acceptable social uses. However, the inclusion of the sneaking out of bed subplot allows Musgrave to represent her adolescent use of computers as exceptional (falling outside the narrative of developing competence with computers through family-sanctioned access and use that Knobel describes) albeit in a very a conventional and acceptable way (through the familiar trope of an adolescent sneaking out of bed to misbehave). Musgrave’s paralinguistic performance clues the audience in to what makes her narrative “tellable” in Bruner’s terms, what makes it interesting and worth listening to (30). Furthermore, Musgrave places this tellable element at the end of her narrative, where it functions as a rhetorical device to encourage the audience to pay attention throughout her narrative, helping Musgrave conclude her story with a flourish of interesting detail.