The 'conventions' needed for durably adopting new information technology.

The general public does not adopt technology in a faceless situation with nothing standing between users and machines. Intermediaries of several sorts - physical, social, technical and affective transform this situation. The ways 'conventions' have been worked out in drivers' education can be used to assess what must still be done for the new information technology to be widely and lastingly adopted. Despite this technology's instability, the emergence of such conventions can be observed (through owner services, search-engines or intelligent agents), even though a cleavage is placing the uses of this new technology outside the purely technical universe of computers. (C) 2001 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS.