Notes for an Essay on Microsoft Word

Notes for an Essay on Microsoft Word

Damn the paperclip to hell.

My thinking is in a transitional state, as I sort out things technical and personal. As a result, this Ftrain article is not a finished thing, but a big pile of ideas, thrown out of my head into a buffer. You're welcome to any ideas you like, but there are so many digressions, so few real points, you may want to spend your time elsewhere.

I make my living putting words, then paragraphs, then sections of text, into structured sequences. I could call it writing, but it is often as much sorting or design or listing. Some of my sequences are published as brochures, business articles, or Web sites, others are read by corporate Vice Presidents and discarded. Some influence the design of a particular piece of software. From necessity, I usually create these documents in Microsoft Word, the established, standard tool for American corporate alphanumeric symbol-arranging.

Microsoft Word is a fascinating landscape of cultural thought, expressed as a consumer software product. It breaks the writing process of creating a document into the application of hundreds of small tools, very few of which have anything to do with writing words. Most of the tool involve operating upon symbols, syymbols which might or might not be made of the characters on your keyboard. One tool might allow you to sketch a circle, turn a paragraph red, or include a rotating 3D cube in the middle of your document.

In the most recent millennia, thousands of rhetoricians and professors have desconstructed the writing process into component structures, from before Aristotle to I.A. Richards to Richard Lanham. While they've written enormous essays on the theory of composition and the structure of documents, Microsoft has not heeded their counsel in its design for Word. Microsoft has built something quite different, a composition tool for various kinds of media, something McLuhanist, with Postmodern currents beneath it, and ultimately intended to serve the marketplace rather than promote best practices. Many computer types seem fascinated by Postmodernism. I've written a mini-essay on this, which began as a note but got too big for its trousers. It's included at the bottom of this article.

Other software is also designed along these lines. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, was first built to match the needs of those preparing images for press. It offers a host of components based on darkroom techniques - "dodge," "burn," and so forth, as well as canned "filters," which are the same in theory as MSWord's host of icons. The filters are a sort of prefab creativity, and mostly emulate other media; they turn images into pretend oil paintings, or photocopies, or crosshatch drawings. Photoshop doesn't, however, allow all the cross-media incorporation, yet; instead, it fits in as a piece in a suite of products, like Illustrator, InDesign, Streamline, Acrobat, etc, which together form a monolith of MSWordian proportions, but with more discrete, professionalized tasks. As image or video processing becomes more and more a daily task, however, you can expect the worst abuses of Word to perpetrated upon other software. Even the free-software GIMP has a built-in e-mail mode, created self-consciously to fulfill the computer-science axiom that "all software expands until it can send mail."

Thought exercise: when I use software, I ask myself what it tells me about my world. The browser which will display this random, meandering essay tells me, in large icons, that I may wish to go back from this page, receding, or forward to where I've been before. My personal experience of the non-linear Web is very linear; I move back and forth across a line of pages, creating a personal "history" file (which I can also browse), adding bookmarks to a menu, where they're listed in the order I put them there. Later, I can sort them into a non-linear, categorical form.

So the browser is an archive, a timeline, in its way.

There's more, though. Its primary application is to display Web pages,. Most browsers now contain tools to create Web pages, chat live, send e-mail, and maintain addresses. These are more fundamental acts than reading, which is personal, based on the technology of text; they're communicative. The Browser connects you to the landscape of information, and the other tools allow you means to discuss it, to share inside of it? I know the goal of the browsing experience is to be all-integrative - ultimately turning into Virtual Reality, fully immersive 3D, superseding the phone, superseding face-to-face meetings. The idea then is that there is no conversation without annotations, without references and hyperlinks, and a call to your father will include forwarded jokes, pictures, reviews, everything.

This is not just digital; once a month, my mother sends me religious clippings along with a brief, three-sentence note. She is annotating our relationship, pulling in samples from the media and collaging them onto our connection, adding them to the wire. VR and the Internet simply formalize that sort of thing, by providing a consistent addressing scheme for everything under the sun.

So, why did they choose this approach for the browser? And when you have the obvious solution to that obvious question, then why? And why again? The Why? matters, because everywhere I read, regardless of the creed or ideology of the authors, people agree that the future is tied somehow into all of these networks and digital tools. After all, if you were going to sneak in "cultural imperialism," there's no better way than software design; it flies under the radar in the guise of abstract utility. And these are tools, thus they can be probably be used as weapons in some way. And a million other reasons. The interface of MSWord may not matter as much as the homeless problem, or world hunger, at all. But it might not be as far from those problems as we think. Language is a sacred space for me; I'm not an athiest when I write. While my apartment can be a mess, and my life in shambles, I'm liberated at the black, text-only console.

Recursion: there is also software, in the form of a computer script, inside of the page you're reading now. It just loaded a text file, listing each entry, placing links at the bottom of the page. I wrote it so that I wouldn't need to bother with much HTML, just

tags and image references. It converts a tag into the gray note boxes on the right, without the need for complex HTML when I write. I wrote