I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for it is in such little retired . . . valleys . . . that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant change in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream . . . Washington Irving, \"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,\" 1820

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I. The Rise of the Network Society

Science in Fiction

In this dissertation I trace the formation of citizens of the information age by comparing visions and practices to make children and the general public computer literate or cultured in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. Computer literacy and computer culture programs in these three countries began in the early 1970s as efforts to adapt 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 on the ideas and influence of three individuals who played formative roles in propelling computer 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 meant more than developing computer skills or learning how to passively use the personal computer. Each envisioned a distinctive way of incorporating the machine into the individual human’s ways of thinking and being—as a cognitive enhancement in the United States, as a culture in France, and as a partner in the Soviet Union. The resulting human-computer hybrids all demanded what I call a playful relationship to the personal computer, that is, a domain of free and unstructured, exploratory creativity. I trace the realization of these human-computer hybrids from their origins in the visions of a few pioneers to their embedding in particular hardware, software, and educational curricula, through to their development in localized experiments with children and communities, and finally to their implementation at the scale of the nation. In that process of extension, pioneering visions bumped up against powerful sociotechnical imaginaries of the nation state in each country, and I show how, as a result of that clash, in each national case the visions of the pioneers failed to be fully realized. In conclusion, I suggest ways in which the twentieth-century imaginaries of the computer literate citizen extend beyond their points of origin and connect to aspects of the contemporary constitutions of humans in the computerized world.

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Making citizens of the information age : a comparative study of the first computer literacy programs for children in the United States, France, and th

by Patricia Kerslake, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010 (first published 2007), 217 pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978 1 8463 1504 6 This is a book about the intimate relationship between ...

Science fiction and empire

Collection of 56 critical essays on science fiction, divided into ‘History’, ‘Theory’, ‘Issues and Challenges’ and ‘Subgenres’ sections.

The Routledge companion to science fiction

Preface 1. Problems of Definition Overview 2. Science Fictions Before Gernsback 3. Proliferations: the 1930s 4. Campbell's 'Revolution' in Context: the 1940s 5. Cold War, Consumerism, Cybernetics: the 1950s 6. New Realities, New Fictions: the 1960s and 1970s 7. New Voices, New Concerns: the 1960s and 1970s 8. New Politics, New Technologies: the 1980s and 1990s 9. Empire and Expansion: the 1980s and 1990s 10. Possible Futures Works cited Guide to further reading

The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction

An edited collection of 13 essays exploring the relationships between Marxism and sf literature and film.

Mark Bould

Papers

The Routledge companion to science fiction

The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction

Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction

Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City

Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy