hildren's emotional and educational development,
and simultaneously condemned for taking them away from more wholesome or worthwhile
This kind of schizophrenia is also apparent in contemporary responses to digital
technology. On the one hand, there is a form of visionary utopianism, particularly among
educationists. Seymour Papert, the inventor of 'logo' programming language, for example,
argues that computers bring about new forms of learning, which transcend the limitations of
older methods, particularly linear methods such as print and television (Papert, 1993). It is
children who are seen to be most responsive to these new approaches: the computer somehow
releases their natural creativity and desire to learn, which are blocked and frustrated by old-
fashioned methods. According to Papert, the computer is 'the children's machine'.
Such utopianism is also increasingly popular in the area of literacy. Some writers, for
example argue that digital technology will bring about a new form of democratic literacy. It will
bring the means of expression and communication within everyone's reach, and thereby
'enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways'. This leads in turn to what might be
called a form of political utopianism. Jon Katz (1996), for instance, regards the Internet as a
means of children's liberation: it provides children with opportunities to escape from adult
control, and to create their own cultures and communities. "For the first time', he argues,
'children can reach past the suffocating boundaries of social conventions, past their elders' rigid
notions of what is good for them'. It is children, according to Katz, who will 'lead the
This utopian view forges a connection between a particular mythological construction of
childhood and a parallel mythology about technology, which is powerful...