Becoming a Citizen of the Information Age

In this dissertation I trace the formation of citizens of the information age bycomparing visions and practices to make children and the general public computer literateor cultured in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. Computer literacy andcomputer culture programs in these three countries began in the early 1970s as efforts toadapt people to life in the information society as it was envisioned by scholars, thinkers,and practitioners in each cultural and sociopolitical context. The dissertation focuses onthe ideas and influence of three individuals who played formative roles in propellingcomputer education initiatives in each country: Seymour Papert in the United States,Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in France, and Andrei Ershov in the Soviet Union.According to these pioneers, to become computer literate or computer cultured meantmore than developing computer skills or learning how to passively use the personalcomputer. Each envisioned a distinctive way of incorporating the machine into theindividual human's ways of thinking and being-as a cognitive enhancement in theUnited States, as a culture in France, and as a partner in the Soviet Union. The resultinghuman-computer hybrids all demanded what I call a playful relationship to the personalcomputer, that is, a domain of free and unstructured, exploratory creativity. I trace therealization of these human-computer hybrids from their origins in the visions of a fewpioneers to their embedding in particular hardware, software, and educational curricula,