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 informations could be in the Help menu but:

• help menu > balloon help, initiate Explorer, documentation. No other data
• office assistant > not actual use but digital assistance, 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 were 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 being look the same, writing becomes peripheral to the processing.
• underlying grammar conform to what expected by a standardized proprietary interface
• menu bar have list of verbs putted as tasks (file,edit,view...)
• ...

Effective HCI require 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 ricapitualation of past forms but writer of SF in scientific extrapolation of terms within currently available nominative frameworks whilist a sense of beyond. 'as the user learns the new system, the language installs the user in the system'. Then interface.

delete as appropriate

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digital abundance