Job Creators and Communicators

by: Madeline Baker, The Ohio State University



Introduction: “Confessions of a Job-Creator” and Cooperation

The idea for this exhibit was sparked by a blog post I read during election season 2012.  The post was called “Confessions of a Job-Creator” and was published on alevei, a political blog by a former professor and friend of mine.  In this post, the author tells the story of her participation in building an automotive repair business with her husband (referred to as “Mr. Alevei” on this semi-anonymous blog). 

She argues that her job as a professor in a publicly funded state university equipped her to help draft the business plan because:

A business plan is like scholarly research. It makes an argument and supports it with evidence. It requires a ton of research and a compelling narrative. Basic English-major stuff. It has to make the case to lenders and other potential investors that the proposed business will be a solid investment.

           

Her employment in the university also allowed for relationships between the growing business and helpful resources from the Small Business Administration and the Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center, both federally funded initiatives to support entrepreneurism. 

Most importantly, though, she adds that her job as a public sector employee, which had been labeled by some candidates as a waste of state and federal money, was crucial in supporting their family in the years before her husband’s business was successful enough for him to take a paycheck home after all the expenses.  She writes:

It was my paycheck – my below-market state employee’s paycheck – that bought the shop the time it needed, bought Mr. Alevei and me the time we needed so that he could have the chance to put everything he had into making his business the success it is today. There is simply no way that we could have survived long enough without my paycheck for the shop to succeed and to create those five good-paying, secure jobs that did not exist in 2007.

In this post, the author deploys narrative for rhetorical and political purposes to combat the discourses she had heard in the Republican National Convention, (in her words: “self-righteous, rugged-individualist, free-market, all-by-myself bootstrap delusions”).  Her message of cooperation and collaboration, and of the interdependence between the public and private sectors, inspired me to develop an exhibit built from the narratives of other small business creators. 

The narratives were collected for and under the auspices of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN).  My intention was to discover the extent to which other people’s stories of how they learned the literacy skills necessary for starting a successful business would align with the narratives of cooperation and interdependence in the alevei post.

Of course, as often happens when working with living narrators – telling themselves into being in a format, medium, and mode of their choice – the stories exceed the expectations and alter the questions of the researcher.  As David Bloome reflects in his Foreward to Stories that Speak to Us , a published collection of curated exhibits of DALN Narratives, this process of contributing, collecting, and archiving narratives is unruly.  He writes that:

[T]he provision of contexts for storytelling that allows people to become unruly is key to allowing the generation of representations of everyday life (including literacy in everyday life) that have some potential for allowing people to reclaim ownership over at least some aspects of their lives. 

In this unruly fashion, the DALN contributors whose stories construct this exhibit moved it in directions I had not anticipated.  They certainly mentioned elements of cooperation and interdependence in their stories of developing literacy skills and creating their businesses, but another consistent and compelling trend emerged from their stories as well:  the way that the development of technology - especially the internet, email, and social media – has shaped both their businesses and their acquisition of literacy skills.  

I argue that their narratives reveal that technology serves as:  

·      A social and cultural context for their individual stories of literacy and business

·      A medium that facilitates communication, cooperation, and interdependence among business partners, employees, and clients.

Thus, in the interest of letting the narratives guide the exhibit and the analysis, I shifted the focus of the exhibit to the development of digital literacy skills in the context of small business creation.  In a special issue of Educational Technology & Society, Eshet-Alkalai and Soffer (2012) define digital literacy as “a wide range of technological, cognitive, and social competences.”  They add that:

            Digital literacy, then, is not limited simply to computer and Internet operation and orientation.  It also relates to a variety of epistemological and ethical issues that arise due to the unique characteristics of digital technologies and that are often overlapped with trends related to the post-modern and post-structural era.  These include questions related to the authority of knowledge, intellectual property and ownership, copyright, authenticity and plagiarism.

This expansive definition conceives of digital literacy as dealing with multiple technologies, and as working in multiple directions: both in the composition and consumption of media.  Other scholarship on literacy as related to business and technology including Wicks (2001), Muir (2002), Baron (2003), Kessler & Bergs (2003), Feldmann & Zerdick (2005), and Silverstone (2005) generally considers singular digital literacy skills.  Furthermore, these studies trace general trends of how people acquire digital literacies, or of how the use of new media affects traditional, text-based literacies. 

Based on the multiple and unruly narratives of DALN contributors, this exhibit seeks to honor the more expansive definition of digital literacy provided by Eshet-Alkalai and Soffer (2012). At the same time, it seeks to honor the particular experiences, temporalities, and positions of the narrators. 

I am assisted in this goal of honoring and analyzing the particularity of each narrative by analytics from the field of narrative theory - specifically analytics of narrative temporality by Brockmeier (2000), and of narrative positioning by Bamberg (1997).  These theories provide a means for understanding the interplay between the social and cultural development of digital technologies with personal narratives about the use of these technologies in the context of small businesses.  The analytics also elucidate how these narrators form relationships and connections with clients, associates, and employees via these technologies.

Literature Review: Digital Literacy and Business

R.H. Wicks’ (2001) book titled Understanding Audiences: Learning to use the media constructively serves as a relatively early example of theorizing digital or media literacy.  He writes, “media literacy implies taking charge of one’s media environment to use it most effectively,” and establishes four dimensions of media literacy: cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral (p. 21).  Wicks’ conception of media literacy focuses more on the consumption (rather than the composition) of media, recommending skills for processing, evaluating, and assimilating or discarding existing media messages.

On the other hand, an article by Muir (2002) in Business Communication Quarterly focuses on business literacy as it relates to both production and consumption of texts.  He begins with statistics that identify over one third of the American workforce as lacking the necessary business literacy skills to perform well in their jobs.  Muir interviews two business literacy consultants to explore how various programs are counteracting this trend with continuing education for workers.  In some cases, this includes courses in business writing and communication, and in others, business literacy is defined more in terms of financial knowledge.  For instance, in the words of one consultant, Karen Berman, business literacy is “understanding how one’s department affects the company’s bottom line” (pp. 100-01). 

A collection titled New Media Language (2003) shifts attention back to language and digital media, with contributors using a sociolinguistic approach to explore how language use shifts with the adoption of new technologies such as email and SMS messaging.  Baron, in “Why email looks like speech” (2003), takes a more conservative approach, arguing that the high level of informality and candor in email is indicative of a decreasing concern with public face.  Interestingly, this argument runs counter to many of the DALN contributors’ stories, which illustrate how email and social media allow them to craft a respectable and desirable public face for themselves and their businesses.

In the same collection, Kesseler and Bergs (2003) take a different approach, seeing the use of digital technologies like email and SMS messaging as a sign of expanding, rather than deteriorating literacies.  They write, “As new communicative and linguistic skills develop, the emergence of a new kind of mass (media) literacy and creativity need not oust existing skills but may be extremely useful for the development of both old and new capacities in young people” (p. 83). 

This idea of expanding literacy is continued in a 2005 report titled E-merging Media: The future of communication wherein contributors focus both on the composition and consumption of new media.  Editors Feldmann and Zerdick (2005) write in the Introduction that “The Internet unites within a single technical medium two communication possibilities that up to now have been clearly separated: its publication function...and individual communication...On top of this, it permits an organizational orientation that spans between professional and non-professional content production” (p. 21).  Silverstone (2005) takes up a similarly broad conception of the internet and digital media in his chapter, wherein he defines not only a literacy of the media, but a civics.  He challenges media users in multiple contexts to ask, “In what ways do the media both address us as, and enable us to be, global citizens, participants, and actors in natural, commercial and cultural environments all of which extend beyond both the immediacy of neighborhood and nation?” (p. 369).

While these articles and chapters vary in how they define digital literacy, they all describe general trends in digital literacy acquisition.  These narratives of acquisition tend to be broad in scope and linear in shape, whereas the narratives from the DALN contributors, Mike and Julie Sharp, Jerry Pawlowicz, Melanie Guzzo, and Patrick Shaughnessy, employ more complex narrative shapes, and reveal the ways that digital media serves to connect people, and to position them in various ways. 

 

Methodology: Narrative as an “implicit social act”

Before considering how the narratives collected here speak to, complicate, and shift the research questions that founded this exhibit, it is important to discuss the process by which the narratives were recorded and contributed. 

Kenneth and Mary Gergen (1983) describe the performance of autobiographical narrative as “engaging in an implicit social act” (p. 268).  That is, even as a person constructs a narrative that will purportedly describe or reveal their self, the act of telling is bound to and shaped by the audience.  Gergen and Gergen write, “in understanding the relationship among events in one’s life, one relies on symbols that inherently imply an audience.  Further, not all symbols imply the same audience; personal narratives that have communicative value for certain audiences will be opaque to others” (p. 268).  These statements about the way personal narratives are constructed through audience interaction, and, indeed, vary in their communicative power depending on the audience, show the importance of carefully describing the audience and context of the narratives used in this exhibit.

There are challenges associated with finding interested and willing subjects to contribute narratives to the DALN.  People might find the contribution process to be time-consuming, technically difficult, or invasive (given that they sign a consent form, which awards their narrative as a deed of gift to the open access archive, after which point it can be used for teaching, learning, and research).  Trust can also be an obstacle as narrators will be unlikely to share personal stories if they are uncomfortable with the facilitator and listener.

Thus, I found that the most interested and willing contributors were people with whom I already had personal relationships, including relatives and friends.  I selected possible participants who identify themselves as business creators, and reached out to them via email or phone call.  In these messages, I described the project as a collection of stories about literacy and business creation and asked whether they would be willing to contribute their stories to the collection. 

Given that the potential contributors were people I know, the rate of positive response was thankfully very high.  To make the process of recording narratives as convenient as possible for the contributors, I traveled to their homes or workplaces with a Zoom camera and a sheet on which they gave informed consent and offered metadata to be associated with their narrative in the archive (such as relevant time periods, regions, gender, race, class, and related keywords).  Thus, as is evident in the backgrounds of the video narratives used here, they were recorded in the settings of the contributors’ daily lives: in a hair salon, in sitting rooms, and across kitchen tables. 

Before starting the camera, I would answer any questions the contributors had about the project or the archive, and briefly describe the kinds of stories I was looking for: stories about learning to read and compose, stories about starting their businesses, and stories about how they use reading and composing in their business.

As the camera starts, my own voice can be heard asking the contributors to introduce themselves and describe their businesses.  Given that I already knew the contributors personally, these introductions are for the benefit of people who may access their narratives on the DALN in the future, or encounter them in exhibits such as this.

Below are the introductory statements from the five contributors:

Mike and Julie Sharp, owners of a dental practice, Sharp Smile Center.

Jerry Pawlowicz, investment advisor.

Melanie Guzzo, owner of Virtue Vegan Salon.

Patrick Shaughnessy, owner of Section 8 post production company.

However, as the contributors shifted from introductions to stories about literacy and business (sometimes with my prompting, other times without) the dynamics of the interaction seem to narrow to a conversation between the contributors and myself.  This shift to a more intimate audience is primarily due to:

•       The friend or family relationships among the contributors and facilitator.
•         The informal, comfortable settings of the recordings.
•          My own participation as an active listener and interlocutor.  Although I do not appear visually in any of the footage, my voice can be heard in each narrative.  At the time, it just seemed like the natural response to hearing a story from a friend or family member, but I think that my affirmations, questions, and laughter encouraged the contributors to feel more comfortable telling the stories, and affected which parts of the story they selected, emphasized, and clarified.

Thus, as Gergen and Gergen observe, despite the fact that one person (or, in the case of Mike and Julie Sharp, two people) appears on the screen, the recording of these narratives was a social act, a recording of conversations and story telling among people who know each other.

This also supports Gergen and Gergen’s assumption that personal narratives communicate differently depending on the audience, and that some material may be “opaque” to those outside the immediate or imagined audience.  In reviewing and analyzing the footage, I notice that some references are determined by my status as the present listener. 

For instance, Patrick mentions “his wife” once, and “Karen” at another point; it’s not clarified in the narrative that this is the same person.  This is a case where, given that he and Karen are my aunt and uncle, he was directing his narrative toward an audience (and family) member who knows both him and Karen well.  In another narrative with family friends Mike and Julie Sharp, they refer directly to me as a listener at some points in the narrative, mentioning things like “your generation” and “people your age.”  In this case, they are not only making references to me based on our personal relationship, but grouping me, a 23-year-old, into certain demographics or populations they wish to speak to or about. 

Overall, then, the footage on which this exhibit is based is part narrative, part conversation, and part interview.  These informal exchanges of stories and questions illuminate interesting points about the development of digital literacy and the way people connect via digital media.

Part I: Rise of Technology, Autobiographical Time, and Brockmeier

In his 2000 article, “Autobiographical Time,” Jens Brockmeier considers how time functions in autobiographical narratives.  He builds on the ideas of Gergen and Gergen, who not only argue that narrative construction is an implicitly social act, but also that autobiographical narratives are diachronic and reflexive, meaning, in the words of Brockmeier, that, “identity...is not only a construction but a reflexive construction [that] embraces two or more constellations in time, which are to be connected” (2000, p. 53).  He goes on to add a third dimension of time, saying that, “autobiographical remembering is... a back-and-forth movement between the past and the present that furthermore relates to the future” (p. 54).  Brockmeier’s idea that autobiographical narrators index multiple registers of time seems particularly well represented in the narratives in this exhibit.  In fact, two timelines seem to intersect in these narratives: on one hand, a timeline of social change due to technological development, and on the other, a narrative of personal development of business sense and digital literacy.

These intersecting timelines lead narrators to converge personal stories with a social and cultural timeline of technological development.  Brockmeier identifies this convergence of temporalities as an important feature of autobiographical time, saying that autobiographical narratives involve “a particular synthesis of cultural and individual orders of time” (2000, p. 51).  Because they achieve this synthesis, these narratives offer a more complex story of technological development than is presented in the articles and books on digital literacies referenced in this work. 

For instance, Baron’s (2003) article on e-mail grammar and etiquette does construct a narrative of a sort to explain the decrease in attention to correctness in email.  She links together cultural events including several educational reforms and a decreasing concern with upward class mobility among Americans.  This narrative, which forms the skeleton of Baron’s article, focuses primarily on cultural or social trends and arguably follows Brockmeier’s first, simplest model of narrative time: the linear model.  Brockmeier writes that the linear model, “is that of a succession, a continuous sequence of events, which is coextensive with historical time conceived of as a linear and irreversible ‘flow of nows’” (p. 62).  Baron aligns a linear progression of historical events with a linear regression of attention to formality and correctness.

Other scholars in business, technology, and digital literacy also include implicit narratives of the development of technology in their writing.  For instance, the contributors to the E-Merging Media (2005) collection create a linear timeline of the development of the internet, and cast this line forward, making predictions and prescriptions for media strategies, literacy, and civics.  The forward motion seems to be inevitable, and these articles emphasize the unknown future, rather than viewing the past in relation to the present.

In contrast, the narratives collected here take different shapes.  Often, the social or cultural story of technological development still appears in linear form, but the personal stories of the narrators' interactions with this technology take various shapes, and are rarely if ever linear.  The circular and cyclical shapes of these personal narratives temper the linearity and inevitability of the cultural narratives of technology. 

These narratives of technological development were quite spontaneous and incidental.  The beginning questions posed to the narrators (which asked them to tell about themselves, their businesses, and how they learned the literacies specific to their businesses) did not mention technology.  However, as many narrators reflected on the process of building their business or on the literacy skills they had acquired, they began to tell about the development of new technologies, placing these events alongside a personal timeline of business and literacy development.  These stories struck me as interesting when they came up, so, as is evident in the clips below, my own voice can often be heard asking follow-up questions about the technology stories. 

For instance, Mike and Julie Sharp, owners of a dental practice in Kalamazoo, MI, remember back to the process of opening their practice in 1982-83.  Julie says that they opened the practice thirty years ago and adds, “so you’re really asking us to dig back.”  Here, as Brockmeier describes, Julie uses linguistic markers of time, including dates and metaphors.  This metaphor of “digging” seems to set the tone for the autobiographical narrative that the Sharps co-construct.  Events are narrated not in chronological or linear order, but in the order in which they remember them. 

At the beginning of the narrative, Julie considers what has changed in the thirty years since they’ve opened the practice, and immediately mentions technology as a major change.  Mike picks up this trend, telling how they purchased their business space from a retiring dentist.  The building came with two operatories, and a box of handwritten patient records on 5x7 cards.  He returns to this idea of record keeping much later in this 80-minute narrative, and describes the process of digitizing his dental records in 2000.  Though these two stories are spaced apart in the telling, they form a linear narrative of technological development over time.  However, as the clips below show, while the story of the technological developments seem linear and inevitable, the personal stories of how they learned, used, and interacted with these technologies take more complicated shapes.    

They begin the narrative of their practice thirty years ago, telling how Mike began to treat patients at night after working his day job, while Julie and his mother communicated with patients, and worked with billing, record keeping, etc.  As they go on to describe how they built a patient base, Julie brings up another technological development, described in the clip below: the typewriter they purchased for the office.

Mike and Julie describe their office's typewriter c. 1982.

In the clip, Julie employs the structure of “retrospective teleology” that Brockmeier observes in circular autobiographical narratives; that is “the reconfiguration of the past in an act of retrospection which first of all aligns a view in the here and now” (p. 63).  She begins with the story of Mike’s mother helping them with the practice, and reflects that computers were very new to all of them at the time, mixing the individual or family story with the cultural development of computers.  Then, discussing the newness of computers seems to remind her of the typewriter, and she says, “Remember the typewriter we had?  It was really cool.”  At the end of the clip she says again of the typewriter: “it was pretty jazzy.” Julie delivers both statements with a humorous tone, as all three of us (as well as the audience) now have the perspective to see the technological developments that have succeeded the typewriter.  Our current perspectives on technology shape, as Brockmeier argues, the narration of past events in this section.

With some prompting questions from myself, and with statements that often overlap, Mike and Julie describe this typewriter - Mike saying that it had a “correction key” and “one of the first LCD screens,” and Julie saying that they “were able to program insurance forms” with it.  These overlapping descriptions add depth and variety to the narrative of the typewriter.  Mike’s statements place this particular machine on a timeline with other technological developments, while Julie’s statements are related to how and why it was used in their office.

They also both remember that, for the programming feature to work, you had to line up the paper exactly.  If you didn’t, Julie says, “it would reject it,” and Mike adds, “you touched the line.”  This exchange is animated with both laughter and hand gestures to illustrate the functioning and malfunctioning of the typewriter.  This story about errors with the typewriter adds a cyclical element to the narrative.  Instead of simply reflecting in a linear fashion that the typewriter made them more productive, their narrative reveals the touch-and-go process of learning new technologies. 

This story, paired with others about the difficulties with technology throughout, adds a cyclical dimension to their entire narrative.  Brockmeier describes the cyclical model thusly: “in telling their lives, people often emphasize...repetitive structures” (p. 64).  Because it occurs in the first ten minutes of the narrative and includes examples of both increases in productivity as well as challenges, this typewriter anecdote forms the earliest example of a cycle that will repeat throughout the rest of the narrative.

This cycle of describing challenges as well as gains from new technologies continues with examples about digitizing medical records, working with digital x-rays and intra-oral cameras, and website design.  While the typewriter is the earliest example both chronologically and in the narrative order, one of the most recent cycles they narrate involves social media.  

Mike and Julie discuss adapting to social media and other technologies.

In this clip, Mike responds to a question I had asked at an earlier point about other differences between the time when they began their practice and today.  He describes the rise of social media with an emphasis on generational differences.  He establishes himself and Julie as an older generation, who are less familiar with technology, saying, “we as fifty-something individuals have had to try to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape of communication, and it’s not always easy for us.”  He adds that he feels less willing to relinquish his privacy, saying, “most people of your generation think nothing of putting all kinds of information out on facebook, and I do not have facebook.  I don’t want it.”  Again, with his emphasis on his and Julie’s age, as well as his definition of a generation of younger people, he is using linguistic structures of time.  It appears at this point that he has set up a divide between the two generations, and that he has opted out of the “rapidly changing landscape of communication.” 

However, this simple division between generations is quickly complicated by Julie’s interjection that, though Mike does not have or want a facebook page, their office has one.  This is where another cycle of difficulties and benefits of technological change begins.  In the typewriter example, the initial resistance was due to some operational difficulties.  Set thirty years later, the obstacles described in this example are a lack of time, and an unwillingness to relinquish privacy. 

As with the typewriter example, though, the benefits of the technology are enumerated along with the difficulties or resistance, though in this case, with an interesting narrative tone.  Mike says, “in order to stay up with the times, our office has to have a facebook page, because we have to get people to like us.”  While this statement does show that social media does help them stay up to date and build client loyalty, the tone of the statement shows Mike’s continued reluctance about social media.  He puts the words “the times” in scare quotes, and employs a sarcastic tone of voice when he says, “we have to get people to like us.”  This shows a reluctant embrace of the technology.

Even with this resistance in the personal story, this section of the narrative still emphasizes the inevitable linear progression of technology.  Indeed, at the end of this clip, Mike says, “We have to adapt these modalities, otherwise...” Julie jumps in, “we are left behind.”  Mike finishes his thought saying, “otherwise, we are lost in a digital internet age.”  This language of adapting, being left behind, or being lost in an age that is moving on seemingly without them again exemplifies Brockmeier’s point about how metaphors of time shape autobiographical narratives.  These statements show that the shape of this narrative, with its intersecting timelines of technological and personal developments, is a linear social and cultural narrative, with personal cycles of struggle and adaptation nested inside.

Another contributor also mixes a linear story of technological development, with a personal narrative of his experience with that technology.  Jerry Pawlowicz is 43 years old, and works independently as an investment advisor.  Within his larger narrative of how he established his business and how he gained the literacy skills necessary for success, he too nests smaller narratives about technological developments throughout his working life.

One interesting example is his story about the disappearance of the typing pool in the early 1990s, right after he graduated from college. 

Jerry describes early word processing technology c. 1992.

In the clip, he uses distinct temporal language to identify the time of the story, and his age and phase of life when the story takes place.  He says, “I’m probably one of the first generations that when I came out of school, we had a typing pool available for one year,” and identifies himself as being 22 years old and just out of college at the time. 

This language of age and generation then gives way to the context of the present.  As he starts to tell his story about his experience with some of the earliest word processors, he says that this story seems interesting now, considering the recent release of Windows 8, and all the “Apple euphoria” that pervades the present moment.  Again, similar to Julie’s descriptions of the “cool” and “jazzy” typewriter, these reflections represent the retrospective teleology of circular narratives – past events being understood in light of the present. 

This knowledge of present day technology, shared between Jerry, myself, and the larger audience, informs the way he narrates the next section.  He remembers that in his first year of work, he and his colleagues had some of the first laptops, and that salespeople brought them word processing software on discs saying, “These will be really good for you.”  Jerry explains how you could save a letter and re-use it, and that the salespeople promised, “It will make you more productive.”  As he repeats these statements from the software salespeople, he animates his voice with a touch of humor, raising his eyebrows and exaggerating the statements. 

The reason for his humorous tone is revealed when he says, “Then you started doing it, then the typing pool went away, and then you were going to work on Saturdays typing letters.”  This story serves as another example of how the shape of a progressive, linear narrative of technological development and increased productivity can be altered by personal narratives about using this technology.  Jerry’s statements and tone of voice contrast the increased productivity promised him by the software salespeople, and the reality of his experience: that using this word processing technology himself meant that he was responsible for typing all of his own letters, often doing it outside of business hours. 

Jerry goes on to describe another technological development in which he was involved: revolutionizing the auto insurance claims industry from a paper and negotiation based system, to a computerized, database driven system.  He tells a story about an older claims adjustor, who asked him if people really wanted this process to be computerized and Jerry responded, “I don’t know, I just know that that’s the way we’re doing it now.”  This statement, which emphasizes the inevitability of technological change, leads Jerry back to the idea of the word processors, reflecting again on how the business communication landscape has changed over time. 

He says of the word processor, “Twenty years after the fact, it’s not such a great idea.  It’s more work, but now you’re doing it on a Saturday.”  And he says, with all technological developments, “you always ask the question: ‘is it better, worse, or the same?’”  He doesn’t answer this conclusively in relation to the word processor, but to the idea that he’s more productive now, he asks, “am I?”  He says, “now, I’m spending more time writing instead of maybe servicing the client more.”  

Jerry’s reflection on the word processor narrative does a couple of things here.  First, he employs retrospective teleology, explicitly mentioning that he’s looking back on this story twenty years later and finding that this development did not deliver all it promised.  Second, it again interrupts the linear narrative of technological progress, even though much of his narrative is devoted to how he still uses technologies like word processors and emails in his work today.  Thus, similar to the Sharps’ narrative of reluctantly acquiescing to the rising social media trend, Jerry’s narrative catalogues the development of technologies during his working life, while allowing for a critique of these developments from the vantage point of the present. 

Part II: Digital Communication, Narrative Positioning, and Bamberg

Because both narrators and scholars focus so heavily on time, years, ages, and generations when they describe technological developments, Brockmeier’s analysis is a useful tool for interpreting the narratives in this exhibit.  However, given that my initial research interest was in how people cooperate and collaborate in developing business and digital literacy skills, Bamberg’s (1997) analysis of positioning and audience interaction is also useful to illuminate how different relationships are formed in the development of business and digital literacy.  In contrast to Brockmeier’s focus on time and temporality, Bamberg’s way of analyzing narratives “focuses more strongly on how it was performed as the main index for what the narrative as an act of instantiation means to the performer” (p. 335).  Echoing Gergen and Gergen regarding the social dimensions of narrative, Bamberg adds that “the audience is much more of a factor that impinges on the shape of the narrative and its performance” (p. 335).

Bamberg also adds that not only the presence of an audience, but also the occurrence of conversation with the audience shapes the narrative and the autobiographical self that is crafted.  He writes, “thus, in conversations...people position themselves in relation to one another in ways that traditionally have been defined as roles.  More importantly, in doing so, people ‘produce’ one another (and themselves) situationally as ‘social beings’”  (p. 336).  Again, as mentioned in the Methodology section, these narratives lend themselves well to analytics based on social interactions between narrator and audience because all were collected in a conversational format, with me present to respond and prompt further stories with questions.  Bamberg considers how this level of speaker/audience relationality shapes the narrative, as well as two other levels of relations.  All together, his tri-partite analysis poses the following questions:

1. How are characters positioned in relation to each other?
2. How does the speaker position him- or herself to the audience?
3. How does the speaker position various versions of themselves in relation to one another?

Asking and answering these questions as they relate to the narratives in this exhibit helps to illuminate the positioning and relationships between not only the speaker and the listener in the immediate moment, but between the speaker and their clients, patients, employees, and colleagues who appear as characters in their narratives. 

Furthermore, this narrative evidence contrasts with some scholars’ assertions about the rise of digital media and the deterioration of traditional literacy skills.  For instance, N. Baron (2003) analyzes the informality of language in email and writes, “Email, rather than being a linguistic anomaly, is an example par excellence of this growing attitude towards writing as a medium that does not require attention to public face” (p. 92).  She builds narrative arcs in contrasting directions, opposing the rise of the use of email with the deterioration of traditional literacy skills.  Indeed, she asks, “Is email actually hastening the demise of traditional writing norms, especially in light of the galloping shift from hard-copy writing (and reading) to electronically mediated communication?” (p. 93). 

In contrast to Baron’s pessimistic view about the relationship between digital media and literacy, and her assertion that email shows a decline in attention to public face, narratives by Melanie Guzzo and Patrick Shaughnessy show a different relationship between email, social media, and public face.

Melanie Guzzo is 27 years old and is the owner of Virtue Vegan Salon in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio.  Her literacy narrative catalogues the opening of the salon three years ago on, as she says, “a shoestring budget.”  She tells about how, in three years, the business has grown from just her, to a staff of twelve.  As the staff grew, she said, she quickly learned how important writing and reading would be in successfully managing the business and the staff.  She describes writing an extensive manual that details all of the procedures for the salon, from the receptionist’s morning and evening duties, to detailing each procedure or treatment the stylists do for clients.  She reflects that this manual allows the salon to run without her if need be, showing how writing can be a powerful tool in communicating and coordinating with a staff.

Melanie mentions the manual again at another point in the narrative when I ask her about the use of digital media in the salon business. 

Melanie describes the use of social media in her salon business.

In the clip above, Melanie describes the use of social media in her business.  In response to my question about whether she publishes posts to facebook and twitter or whether that’s the job of another employee, she says that the procedures for social media posting are detailed in the manual as well.  She says, “my stylists actually have to take a certain amount of photos and post them to make sort of a social media based portfolio.”  With this statement, Melanie positions herself in relation to her employees, calling them “my stylists” and showing how she makes recommendations and requirements for their social media postings.  She also positions herself in relation to the immediate audience (myself) because she is responding to a question I posed about social media.  Finally, she positions herself, and her stylists, in relation to the wider audience that may view the narrative, saying that the stylists create a “social media based portfolio,” which is available for clients to view and evaluate. 

This statement about the social media portfolios connects to her next statement about the salon’s other postings.  She says, “my administrative manager is responsible for making sure we have a constant posting on twitter and facebook.  You know, even just writing something, and we’re very strict about it having to sound very professional.”  This idea of everything having to “sound very professional” arguably shows an increased concern with public face. By describing this process, Melanie positions herself and her business in relation to the wider audience of social media users and prospective clients who will form their opinion of the business based on its social media presence.  When she describes the manual and the idea of being “very strict” about professionalism, Melanie shows an awareness of the power and potential of social media to form a public face for her business.

Melanie’s careful attention to public face contrasts her narrative with the general trend that Baron (2003) points out of decreasing attention to public face as email continues to develop.  However, an analytic of positioning is useful to see how the attention to public face might depend on the role or the position of the narrator in question.  Baron does analyze both personal and business communication in her article, and still comes to the same conclusion about a increased use of informal tone in both types. However, a narrative like Melanie’s, which has been solicited on the grounds that she is a business owner and therefore positions her as a business owner in the telling, shows that public face and professionalism of digital content is still extremely important to her and to the success and reputation of her business.

Patrick Shaughnessy echoes this heightened concern with public face as it relates to email and social media in his narrative.  He shares on his meta-data sheet that he is 50 years old at the time of telling, and describes his business and his role in it at the beginning of the narrative.  He explains that he owns “a small business in the advertising industry,” and says that he has two partners and that each of them serve in different roles: he is the editor, one is a producer, and the other is a designer.  This early positioning of himself in relation to his business partners is significant in that it highlights the cooperative nature of building and operating their business.  Indeed, he even evokes this cooperation in metaphorical form by saying that their leadership structure is “kind of a three-legged stool.” 

Patrick’s literacy narrative begins with describing the challenges of writing the business plan, which, as he says, has to offer a “compelling reason for people to lend you money.”  His story reaches back to his public school education in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s, and he reflects that he graduated from high school, and even left college, with strong oral communication skills but reading and writing skills that he defines as “poor.”  For this reason, he says that writing the business plan, and all of the succeeding business correspondence proved especially challenging for him.  Even though he’s already done these things successfully, he reflects, “if I had to write a business plan again, I would feel like I was pushing a rock up a hill.”  Again, he uses figurative language to establish and relate different versions of himself, as Bamberg describes.   Audiences can see a younger version of himself who did not receive sufficient education in writing, and an older version who has been successful, but still considers writing to be a challenge.

He also positions himself in relation to other characters, explaining how his six oldest siblings all attended at least some Catholic school in the 1960s and ‘70s, while he and his next oldest brother had only public school education.  He creates a clear divide between the two groups of siblings saying that all of his older siblings are strong writers, while he and his brother struggle with writing.  This division of characters based on writing ability also positions him in relation to another character in the story, his wife Karen, whom he admits he “leans heavily on” to help with grammar questions and to proofread his writing.

Though that particular anecdote shows help and cooperation with Karen in his journey of honing his literacy skills, his stories and reflections about social media show a different way of positioning Karen and other viewers of social media: as potential and actual public critics of the writing he posts on social media sites.  

Patrick describes social media use as a form of publishing.

As he transitions into this story of social media use, Patrick has just been describing his struggles with writing, and now he says that he’s become a better writer in part because of frequent email and social media use.  He says, “You know, every time you write on facebook, you’re publishing.  I think a lot of people don’t care, but I do.”  With this statement, he positions himself in relation to other un-named characters who may not view social media posting as an act of publishing, and therefore may not compose their posts as carefully. 

He goes on to say, “but the worst thing is to have somebody correct your grammar in front of the world, when you’ve put something up on your facebook status, and you’ve written the wrong thing.  Like, Karen will do that to me.”  Here, he mentions that his wife, Karen, will correct his grammar, and I asked, “before or after you post it?”  He responds, “After I post it!”  Here, his description of her involvement positions her as a critic, possibly even a public critic if she comments about grammar errors on the facebook status itself.  In describing Karen, he is not only positioning himself in relation to her, but relating to me as a listener.  He seems to select this as an example that would be particularly humorous to me because they are both my family members and I know them well. 

He also positions himself as being “in front of the world” a couple of times in reference to social media use.  Again, this shows a heightened attention to public face and a heightened awareness of audience, in contrast to Baron’s assertion that composing with digital media leads to a decreased attention to formality, correctness, and public face.    

Patrick’s story continues to emphasize the importance of social media in creating a public persona that is evaluated by others.  Transitioning from discussing personal social media use, and assuming the position of a business owner once more he says, “It’s amazing how important social media is now.  As an employer, as soon as I have a prospective employee, one of the first things I do is look at their facebook page.”  Here, he has shifted positions from being the one who is evaluated by others on his social media posts, to being the employer who evaluates potential employees based on their social media profiles.  He says, “I want to know that they can write a complete sentence...and I want to know that they can use good grammar, but I also want to know that they communicate clearly and correctly, and they have interesting ideas.”  This list of qualifications certainly shows his desire for employees who can communicate correctly and clearly, but his desire that they also have “interesting ideas” shows that social media profiles serve not only as a measure of standard language aptitude, but as a public version of one’s identity.

Patrick emphasizes this idea of the social media profile as public persona when he says at the end of the clip, “It’s pretty amazing how much that now is a tremendous reflection on a person, especially in the communications industry.” 

Throughout this narrative about social media, Patrick’s positioning of himself shifts.  He begins with describing earlier challenges with writing, and then reflects on how he has improved over time.  He also shifts from describing how other characters in the story evaluate his writing and social media posting, to how he evaluates potential employees based on their social media profiles.  In whichever position though, struggling or succeeding, evaluating or being evaluated, Patrick’s narrative underscores the importance of social media in creating an acceptable public persona, both in personal and business contexts.

While Melanie and Patrick’s narratives show how social media influences relationships between employers and employees, Mike and Julie Sharp’s narrative reveals how shifts in other technologies have influenced relationships with their patients. 

Throughout their narrative, they focus on communication with patients, whether marketing to build a base of patients, or learning business communication strategies from seminars so they could get to know patients well and successfully explain complicated dental concepts in a way that patients could understand.

Julie describes the Dear Doctor program.

In the clip above, Julie raises one example of communicating with patients that involves digital media when she talks about a new program they have just purchased called Dear Doctor.  Julie says, “what it is is an accumulation of magazine articles” on various dental treatments.  Julie narrates how this new technology is useful in her job as a dental hygienist, saying, “I might have a conversation about things, and I might say, I’ve got some information that I can e-mail to you, or we could print it.”  In this short story of how she uses this technology, Julie positions herself in relation to her patients in an interesting way.  While the role of a dental hygienist might be understood in a limited way as responsible for cleaning and care of teeth, Julie, armed with these digital resources, is also able to position herself as an educator vis-à-vis her patients.  She is able to explain a treatment to them, while also pointing them to further resources on the topic.  This access to resources through Dear Doctor also changes the positions of the patients in relation to the health professionals, giving them the capacity to educate themselves about treatments and care.

In another part of the narrative, Mike and Julie discuss the particular challenges of communicating with patients in dentistry and how those have been allayed in part by technological developments. 

Mike and Julie describe advances in photography and x-ray imaging.

In the clip above, Mike says, “we have a very difficult task in some respects, because many many of the diseases or problems of the mouth start out as silent; they have no symptoms... I have to convince someone who has no symptoms that they need to spend money at my office.”  As a solution to this problem, Mike and Julie narrate changes in technology, beginning with intra-oral cameras (which were very expensive at the time, but which they saw as a valuable purchase) and ending with the digital x-ray, which can show patients a large screen image of their own teeth. 

As they describe these technological shifts, Mike and Julie position themselves in relation to other dentists, who did not invest in this technology.  Though some of their earlier stories have shown a reluctance about technology, the narrative positioning in this clip establishes them as forward-thinking business people who are willing to invest in new technologies.

Furthermore, as with the Dear Doctor example, their narrative shows how these new technologies allow them to position themselves in new ways vis-á-vis their patients.  Describing the goals of dental photography, Mike says, “we're trying to relate to people, trying to help people see what we see.”  Before this technology, dentists would have the privileged vantage point for viewing people’s teeth, and could only describe the problems they observe and prescribe treatments.  But, with the images, especially the large digital x-ray images, Mike says, “just the sheer size of it, and the ability to point to it makes a psychological change.”  Julie adds to this, “when it’s their teeth, their mouth...it makes it more personal.”  Again, just as the Dear Doctor program allows patients to inform themselves on various topics, the use of intra-oral photography and digital x-rays allows patients to view their own teeth and to make more informed decisions about treatments. 

These and other examples from the DALN contributors point to the ways that digital technologies not only allow business owners to create a respectable public persona for themselves and their business, but also the way that these technologies shift relationships between business creators, employees, clients, and patients.  



Conclusion 

Although these four literacy narratives serve as rich evidence for the processes by which business owners develop digital literacy skills, there are undoubtedly limitations to this study.  On one hand, these stories are just that, stories, and cannot be said to provide a true or comprehensive account of the narrator's identity or development.  Indeed, Bamberg notes that, "In constructing the content and one's audience in terms of role participants, the narrator...constructs a (local) answer to the question: 'Who am I?'  Simultaneously, however, we must caution that any attempted answer to this question is not one that necessarily holds across contexts, but rather is a project of limited range" (1997, p. 337).  In the case of this exhibit, to take Bamberg's caution seriously means to understand these stories not as comprehensive, unmediated accounts of the narrators' identities, but as partial accounts, limited by the constraints and guiding questions of the project (i.e. that I specifically solicited them on the basis of their having created businesses, and that they are therefore constructing a certain identity as business creator based on the expectations of the audience).  

On the other hand, given that the exhibit features only five narrators, it constructs only a local answer to the question of how digital literacy is acquired in the context of creating a business.  Nevertheless, these narratives provide a specificity and a complexity of shape that augment the scholarly research on the topic of business and digital literacy.  These narratives display the unique intersection of the linear narratives of technological development on a wide scale, with circular or cyclical personal stories of interactions with these technologies.  Furthermore, the narratives establish digital literacy as a means of relating to employees, associates, clients, and patients in ever-changing ways.  

Indeed, the narrators' emphasis on forming relationships via digital technology does seem to speak back to my initial interest in proving, like the author of alevei, that businesses are not built alone.  Much of the evidence in these narratives upholds this idea of cooperation and interdependence, whether it is the Sharps delivering the story of how they built the practice together, Melanie reflecting on how her first employee volunteered to work for free until they got the business off the ground, or Patrick describing the "three-legged stool" of his business partnership, or the ways that his family members have helped him improve his writing over the years.

Finally, while attempting to show that businesses are not built alone, it is important to add that neither research nor writing are solitary tasks.  I am extremely grateful to Mike, Julie, Jerry, Melanie, and Patrick for generously sharing their stories, and expanding my ideas and questions.  It is a privilege to interpret and learn from your experience.

References

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