Relationships: Relating to Others around Technology

In addition to the physical spaces and computer programs that flesh out these narratives, the contributors also populate their stories with characters who shape the narrators' memories of their experiences with technology. Beyond the author's self-representation, siblings, parents, classmates, and teachers also feature prominently in the narratives. The other people who shape the narrators' experiences with technology suggest that these narrators’ youthful memories of computer use are often—but not always—social and oriented toward play.

The atmosphere surrounding computers in these memories is also very different, for the most part, from the instrumental orientation found in many school and professional settings. Stuart Selber criticizes approaches to technology education that define technological literacy as “one-dimensional, instrumental, decontextual [, …] a value-free set of skills that can be defined, learned, and measured in absolute terms and whose main purpose is to serve economic advancement” (14, 27). Although such an instrumental perspective may teach students about the structure and operation of software applications, hardware components, and operating systems, Selber argues that it fails to address the contextual, unstable nature of technological literacy as it is enacted in environments inhabited by people and computers in specific social configurations (32-33). In their memories of childhood, most—but not all—of the DALN narrators describe computers as a technology for play and face-to-face socialization, a positive experience that educators might consider drawing on when integrating technology into the classroom.