Relationships: Relating to Others around Technology

Although Lanning’s memory includes explicit instruction from a teacher, he, Musgrave, and Springer also cast their childhood computer use in terms of a supportive community of practice where family members and peers use computers together, without an implicit hierarchy of authority or expertise. Lanning and his classmates and Musgrave and her siblings are clearly in peer-relationships, and even though Springer describes playing computer games with her aunt, there is no sense that the aunt is in charge. Springer represents them playing as equals. In her study of adolescents’ literacy practices, Michele Knobel points to the influence social support for technology exerts on the relationships youth develop with computers. Knobel suggests that “guided participation” or “apprenticeship” in a family or peer context—a specific kind of literacy sponsorship similar to Chandler, Burnett, and Lopez’s description of learning within a video gaming community—cultivates facility and comfort with technology by providing “access to a community of people who are interested in using technology” (95). These private resources—the family members and classmates who Musgrave, Springer, and Lanning include in their stories—offer the narrators funds of technology knowledge and define their experience of technology as a fun and social activity, laying the groundwork for further pleasurable engagement with computers on both an individual and group basis. It is also worth noting that these kinds of early experiences with computers fit into the narrative of youth computer exposure leading to adult technology competence which Selfe describes as characterizing the United States’ national literacy agenda during the 1990s. Reading these relational positionings allows us to position this subset of DALN narratives within the rhetoric of technological literacy associated with the computer literacy initiatives of the 1990s and beyond.