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