User:Tancre/readings/microsoft word

'A society is defined by its amalgamates, not by its tools' Office pre-empts this amalgamation providing tools and paths between them and the users. Word processing in between the public world of the document and those of the user. These worlds are subject to non-disclosure agreements, norms.
Microsoft Office builds a closed idea of workspace providing a disastrous number of features presented as standard, without taking care of their purpose, and the user disappears within the apparatus of work, related to the idea of autonomous behavior as an ideal of free work. Word allows autonomous work but parasites it and rides it. Surplus not needed but stored VS user's self-expanding or changing purpose or data-type. Not Taylorist model (linear) of work but an expectation of the worker to internalize the entire app and be free in it.
Foucault's dilemmas > performing actions while performing the object self. (doubled with the amalgamates)

objects in their place
Autonomous objects in oop but inner working and interrelations between objects are hidden from the user. Some hints from the interface.
The user becomes an object, excluded from the internal transmission of information but interacting with the reallocated elements in the interface. Allocated by their correspondence to the tasks of the user and clustered in groups on the screen. Then a hierarchy of sub-tasks. Strict protocols and wholeness of the tasks. Amalgamate with prioritization of events, tasks, objects, data-type and uses.

Analyze a piece of software (at every level of the software) and extrapolate out:

• documenting every point which constitutes an event
• record the points from one state to another
• which boundaries are produced to certain behaviors
• describes how the event functioned as part of a series of interlocking fields
  • processor characteristics
  • OS
  • models of user behavior
  • work organization
  • qualities of certain algorithms
  • status of various document or file form
  • availability of class libraries
  • markets
  • forms of copyright / licensing agreement
  • aesthetic methodologies
  • trends
  • hierarchy of functions
  • installation

HELP
These information could be in the Help menu but:

• help menu > balloon help, initiate Explorer, documentation. No other data
• office assistant > not actual use but digital assistants, low-grade AI, symbiotic intelligence, cuteness over function.

Solely language Turing test sidestepped with animations, assumption that body-language assume high-informational content. But when interrogated dump back to the documentation + disturbs attention.

word processing
Sun Microsystem' Scott McNeally created Java to develop a form of computing more close with networks, than isolated machines bounded to desktop metaphor. He claims Microsoft was aiming to control the 'written and spoken language of the digital age'.
These two forms of language, formal and natural, are becoming increasingly close > before compilation, code as written text that is at the same time a machine. Two dimensional and multidimensional processual space. Dual quality of software that feeds over into the machnery of language suggesting they both deserve scrutiny.
Ideally a word processor creates an enunciative framework that remains the same no matter which language you want to use (formal, informal..) but biases in words:

• to guess the beginning of a letter
• templates fuelled on fraud, all humans looking the same, writing becomes peripheral to the processing.
• underlying grammar conform to what expected by a standardized proprietary interface
• menu bar have a list of verbs put as tasks (file,edit,view...)
• ...

Effective HCI requires that people and machines can be comprehended in similar terms, so the system can be engineered to maximize the performance of both. Word, no information or communication, but facilitation.
Michael Heim - the finite framework language > visible language of the app (jargons, metaphores, descriptive leaps). >> No McLuhan's medial recapitulation of past forms but a writer of SF in scientific extrapolation of terms within currently available nominative frameworks whilst a sense of beyond. 'as the user learns the new system, the language installs the user in the system'. Then interface.

delete as appropriate
Heim - electronic language > Heidegger's term 'enframement' for the pre-emptive totalizing macro on language in word processing software. language captured into a world that describes the possibilities of its use and archetypes the user. Impossibility of holism translated in the conflicts of the interface.
The interface is the threshold between the structure of the program and the user, contains elements of both. Incorporation of the users through the ability to customize and is relegated to be a class, a masse.
Microsoft Word as the first word processor with a decent enough GUI, but after 5.1 is becoming something else (toolbar as a cognitive fossil, videos). In the context of Office, digital writing to access media + culture of business. Productivity factors for the programmer (text based dialogue boxes VS drag-drop).
Economics of software constricts it, repetition of the past + speed. Evolution of the software but a regurgitation of old abandoned paradigms in the interface (psychometric, psychophysical behaviorist design).

a grey environment increases egg-production in chickens
Dilemma of the computer display > at every screen 2 powerful information-processing capabilities, computer and human. But communication through display which chokes fast, precise, complex communication
Microsoft's answer > put as much as possible on the screen BUT the user remember only a few icons and is locked out from the rest of the program.
Fast communication blocked by the scale of potential interaction sequences. A tool should appear only once, but anyway you don't solve the problem. * semiotics of icons

• continuing spatial organization of data in a computing environment that has gone beyond the desktop metaphor

Iconic languages fail because it is used in a limited way in transport info systems + they look like nouns rather than triggers for verbs as funcitons. Icons and names fails to cohere at an isomorphic level + hidden relation.

digital abundance
'Features' to persuade male users that they are not doing the work previously relegated to female secretaries.
Word compress time for more work from the user + dilate time in the corporate imaginary of Microsoft.
Tools become more complex and more abstract. Tool's composition to monitor the tool itself. Research of the tool in computer interface as an endless search for Heideggerian route to technology as a homing device. Pure forms as a manifestation of a concept or task to be mobilised in the interaction with the user.