Overview

At the end of class earlier this week, one of your professors announced that he had received a research grant to fund his work on media and culture. As part of his research, he is collecting personal narratives in which people describe their experiences learning to work with a new communication technology. He invites you to submit a short personal narrative about your experiences writing or reading your first Facebook post, e-mail, text message, or tweet; the first time you played a video game; the first cellphone you owned; or your first time using another communication medium.

You decide to participate. Your narrative should be written in first person (using I and we) and be semiformal. Pay some attention to spelling and grammar because your text may be published online and in academic journal articles, but feel free to use everyday language, including contractions and quotations from speech. The overall length should be 1,000 to 1,500 words. Your professor has asked that you spend about a third of the narrative analyzing your experiences.

Personal narratives have at least two audiences: the readers of the stories and the writers themselves. For readers, autobiographical narratives can function in several ways. They can provide insight into experiences that the readers may never have had. In comparison to statistical or survey data, personal narratives offer richly detailed experiences.

Personal narratives can also compel readers to reflect on their own experiences, considering things that often pass by without reflection even though they may have important implications: Reading an account of one person’s personal struggle to master a new technology in order to connect with other people can help readers reflect on their own efforts to communicate. Even though the specifics differ between writers and readers, narrative can highlight similarities between both groups.