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

== reading notes == (loose grabs)

"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: "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."