User:Colm/thematic2-Fuller-MSWord

It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word — Matthew Fuller

reading notes

(loose grabs and pastes)

intro

note: this text is not divided into pages, but due to it's monospasaïc nature, I had no choice but to print it. Head to the source I was given print with default styles, and you result in an 11p 'digest'.

^p2_|"A society is defined by its amalgamates, not by its tools" (McLuhan) then Office is an attempt to pre-empt this amalgamation by not only providing what rationalist programmers are content to describe merely as tools but also the paths between them [...]

The work of literary writing and the task of data-entry share the same conceptual and performative environment, as do the journalist and the HTML coder.

The history of literacy is full of instances of technologies of writing taking themselves without consent from structures aimed at containing them - something which at the same time as it opens things up instantiates new norms and demands, [...]

In Taylorist design, the majority of Computer Human Interface as practised today, the user or worker or soldier appears only as a subsystem whose efficiency and therefore profitability can be increased by better designed tools. Whilst, according to John Hewitt, 'The disappearance of the worker has, in fact, been an aspect of most design theory since Morris" what this means contemporarily is that the disappearance of the worker is best achieved by the direct subsumption of all their potentiality within the apparatus of work.

What draws the user to the site of their own special disappearance is possibly even the contrary drive for the disappearance of work in autonomous behaviour as an ideal of free work: ^p3_|"We can call someone autonomous when s/he conceives and carries out a personal project whose goals s/he has invented and whose criteria for success are not socially predetermined." Gorz's definition of autonomous labour.

As a device it allows us to understand that a program such as Word doesn't deny autonomous work or the desire for it, but parasites it, corrals and rides it at the same time as entering into an arrangement of simultaneous recomposition of scope.

against the possibility of the user's self expanding, or changing purpose or data-type

In comparison to the disappearable production lined individual, here the worker is expected to encompass and internalise knowledge of the entire application which replaces it and to be able to roam about, freely choosing their tools and their job.

the instrument to which they have recourse and the subject which acts"7 is at once doubled for the self whose actions, object, domain and instrument are amalgamated with a material-semiotic sensorium - a program - whose entanglements and interrelations are so multifarious.

Objects in their place

Word is, with the rest of Office, put together using object oriented programming.

^p4_|suitable for constructing programs that are built on version by version rather than renewed.

The user becomes an object, but at a peculiar position in the hierarchy of others. It is excluded from the internal transmission of information, and instead allocated representations of elements of this information as interface.

Further interrogability of the program is denied. This is not something specific to Word, and it cannot necessarily be described as problematic but it does point to a direction in which objects could be developed with more independence from the tasks they are locked into.

How are the tasks and the objects that compose them ordered?

To many users it is likely that this [...] option should be so far down a choice tree that it drops off completely. Its relative silliness in the context of a 'serious' work application however makes it a good example of not only how tasks are ordered, but also in the conventional attacks on Word and most recent mass-market software for being bloated with features, what is considered to be either useful or gratuitous.

implications for the quality of the interface, but also for how Word is composed as an amalgamate, what forces and drives it is opened up to in order to shape its prioritisation of various events, tasks, objects, data-types and uses.

^p5_|which models of 'work' have informed Word to the extent that the types of text management that it encompasses have not included such simple features as automated alphabetical ordering of list items or the ability to produce combinatorial poetry as easily as 'Word Art'.

H-E-L-L-P

if you want specific information it largely helps to already know precisely what you require help about as the user already has to be able to name the function in order to describe it to the help's search facility

^p6_|The narrow bandwidth of the solely language based Turing test is side-stepped with animations on the assumption that if enough body-language is thrown within a rectangle of a few hundred pixels, users are going to grant it the same assumed high-informational content that they transferred to jittery Cu-See-Me pornos. This feigned step up the evolutionary ladder towards symbiotic intelligence

Word processing

controlling the "Written and spoken language of the digital age" Java's innovation was in producing a way of leap-frogging operating systems to develop a form of computing more in tune with networks than with isolated machines.

However, the two forms of language are becoming increasingly close. The most obvious similarity is that before being compiled, code is written text, characters in a row, that is at the same time a machine. Kittler eat your heart out

This dual quality of a program feeds over into the machinery of language and suggests that both the language of Word itself and the kinds of language it machines deserve scrutiny.

the ideal of a word processor is that it creates an enunciative framework that remains the same whether what is being written is a love letter or a tax return. What kind of language is the language of Word?

The nomenclature and organisational norms of Microsoft Projects is already beginning to effect the way people think about business reduced to a stuttering sequence of Action Points, Outcomes and milestones. Does the compulsorily informal mode of addressing co-workers that prevails in the Microsoft corporation feed over into the way it speaks to users and the way it double-guesses the way the world should begin their letters?

elegant fax', 'contemporary fax' to 'formal letter' or 'memo', acknowledge that forgery is the basic form of document produced in the modern office.

^p7_|The believable template, hooked up to the mailing list database is an economic machine that works all the better, all the more profitably, if it is fuelled on fraud.

Whilst "In mechanised writing all human beings look the same"10 in the case of templates the writing itself becomes peripheral to the processing.

The underlying grammar of the program conforms to that expected within the standardised proprietary interface. The menu bar at the top of the screen provides a list of verbs which can be actioned on the nouns within the currently active window. These verbs are put matter-of-factly, as tasks: File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Font, Tools, Table, Window, Work, Help.

Effective human-machine integration required that people and machines be comprehended in similar terms so that human-machine systems could be engineered to maximise the performance of both kinds of component

The language of the program benefits from, "The ambiguity inherent in natural language which makes possible words both sufficiently reminiscent of past usages and semantically precise enough to indicate the new".

"As the user learns the new system, the language installs the user in the system'12 It is at this point that the program comes into composition with the user through the interface.

^p8_|

Delete as appropriate

In 'Electronic Language' Heim uses Heidegger's term Enframement13 to describe how the word processing software in effect runs a pre-emptive totalising macro on language.

The interface is the threshold between the underlying structure of the program and the user. As a threshold it contains elements of both. The accrual of transference from the user, their incorporation, is produced in the ability to customise, through preferences, through macros, through autocorrections, user dictionaries, though custom templates, but also formulated in how users are conjured up as a class with needs that can be met en masse.

there are no commands that will ever die in word, no function will ever be lost. The Word 5.1 Toolbar is a cognitive fossil, something like a lizard brain crawled back under the stones of higher consciousness.

there is no clear sense of why you might want to do this, and if so, how that reconfigures the program and its previously core focus, writing.

Whilst it is clear that writing is, under digitisation, of necessity going to be displaced, it is how this change is produced and articulated and the clarity and interrogability of the way in which this is done that determines how well an interface works or not. Word of course exists within the context of Office.

Things are also complicated by the way the software is programmed. ... ... The choice - for the programmer - is obvious."

in order to deal with any perceived competition. For computer human interface design as a discipline though, the aesthetics of the interface is simply a matter of physiology applied, by the spadeful.

^p9_|

A grey environment increases egg-production in chickens

an upper left that remains at a constant angle no matter how far you move something horizontally across the screen: sunshine? Neon strip.

A perspectival cross-fire is under construction.

a fast conduit to every function must be as accessible as possible on the screen: hence many icons on many toolbars occupying much of the screen. The question is not whether this works, it clearly doesn't. Users simply remember a few of the icons that they use regularly and are effectively locked out of the rest of the program.

^p10_|

"The various elements collected together in flatland interact, creating non-information patterns and texture simply through their combined presence"

Iconic languages as used in an extremely limited way in transport information systems, or as proposed by the universalist anthropology of Margaret Mead, are always doomed to fail, swamped at best in connotation or more usually in disinterest.

Help becomes necessary solely because of the vast number of icons that are completely inexplicable.

icons look too often like nouns rather than triggers for verbs as functions, not only do their icons and names individually fail to cohere at an isomorphic level, their relationship to a clearer underlying system is also diminished without any pay-off in flexibility or scope for developing more comprehensive, structural rather than scattershot, understanding.

Digital Abundance

the 'features' that Word now encompasses are simply there to persuade male users that they are not doing work that was previously relegated to female secretaries

^p11_|

The idea runs that producing a human-centred design methodology which opposes a tool-based approach to the Death Star of Cartesianism-Taylorism allows pure form as a manifestation of a concept or task to be mobilised in the production of interaction design melded with thoroughly simplicity to the work and thought patterns of its users.

critique

It's interesting that while an author can spend so much time complaining (rightfully) about an interface, he, himself can not relocate his view enough to consider his tonality as an interface as well. (I am unaware of the context of publication that this text came from, but it seems like an enormous rant sent onto a mailing list. It has references, but the source I was given does not include these references, it prefers monospacability and txt-ability. Nonetheless:) Fuller's points are valid, and thank goodness for the chapterisation, but there is no real read structure to the text. Combine this with the endless sentences and lack of vocal drive, and you have the microsoft word of readability interfaces to an interesting topic, well taken apart by the analysis.