A recent film has one character blown to death at their keyboard.
Underneath the desk they sit at is a bomb controlled by a keystroke
counter. When the number of taps on the keyboard drops below a certain
number, off goes the explosive. A real innovation in the switching
system the bomb uses is that it is tied into the grammar check in
Microsoft Word. The victim is unable to keep tapping away at the same
key until help arrives. They have to keep composing grammatically
correct sentences, line after line, through the cramp in their fingers.
Needless to say, knowing this is both a sure wellspring of verbiage and
a scriptwriter's shortcut to bathos, they compose a last letter to their
loved ones. Eventually though, the agrammaticality of their emotions or
of tiredness sprawls out of even these second guessed finger-tips and as
a green line appears under a patiently panicked phrase, up they go.

This lot is being written with every tool bar visible, every feature
enabled. One third of the screen, a large one, is taken up with grey
tollbars pocked with icons. There is a constant clatter of audio
feedback clicking, shuffling and chiming as the user's attention is
pulled away from putting together a piece of writing into the
manufacture of the text as a perfectly primped document. As you read,
understand that these words are to appear against a background fill
effect of white, grey-veined marble.

Microsoft Word is part of a larger package, Office which contains Excel,
a financial spreadsheet program; Powerpoint, the digitized answer to the
glory of the Over Head Projector; an array of bits and bobs including
low-level code generators for Visual Basic and HTML1 and some stunning
clip art.

If, contra McLuhan, "A society is defined by its amalgamates, not by its
tools"2 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, how they intermix, and
the boundaries and correlations between their different functions, the
objects they work on and the users that they amalgamate with.

All word processing programs exist at the threshold between the public
world of the document and those of the user. These worlds may be
subject to non-disclosure agreements; readying for publication; hype
into new domains of intensity or dumbness; subject to technical codes of
practice or house style; meeting or skirting round deadlines; weedling
or speeding..How does Word meet, detour or expand these drives, norms
and codes in writing?

Like much else, word processing has escaped from its original
centralized, hierarchically positioned place within large organizations
and single-purpose computers3. It has also stayed put, shifting things
about in the work place, but also being trained there. And what it
changes into at work effects how it is used, what it allows to be done,
outside of work. 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, from
reading the bible to the requirement to complete tax statements. At
each new threshold, heresy and fraud are opened up as possibilities, but
at the same time are forced to operate on one more terrain at once.

Microsoft Office slots into the all-you'll-ever-need-for-the-home-office
shelf in the software supermarket with all the placing that only those
who own the store can manage. There's bound to be some scintillating
demographics on exactly who uses the software and how tucked into the
data-storage of some go-gotten demi-god somewhere on a Seattle corridor
laying out exactly how Microsoft project patterns of work and use for
their software, what tools will be needed to meet the challenges of a
new era of productivity. But these aren't the clues we have to go on.
What we do have in order to discover what kind of user is being imagined
and put into place is the mountain of material the program presents.
Since its early versions Word has swollen like a drowned and drifting
cow. The menu bar has stretched to twelve items, the number of tool bars
to eighteen. Don a white coat, open a calculator, multiply these two
figures, then cube them and you get a scientifical idea of the extent of
the domain which Word now covers.

According to James Gleick, features are included in Word with, "Little
more purpose than to persuade the trade press to add one more 'Yes' to
the feature-comparison charts that always accompany word-processor
roundups"4. 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"5 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.

The volume of features in Word is often represented as a disastrous
excess, but this is excess fitted up as standard. 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."6

Gorz's definition of autonomous labour provides a useable rule of thumb,
a workable trope for autonomy which is conflictual and negotiated rather
than its more fantastically 'independent' variant. 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.

The surplus feature mountain warehoused in your computer is stored
against the possibility of your ever needing it, against the possibility
of the user's self expanding, or changing purpose or data-type. Whilst
the ways which Word is actually used by any one individual or work
practice may only be very narrow sections of its entire capability, like
all software of its kind there is a dramatic break with that area of the
Taylorist model of work which involves strict division of labour in the
actual form of the equipment (this is usually achieved by system
management software and by work practices). In comparison to the
disappearable production lined individual, here the worker is expected
to encompass and internalize knowledge of the entire application which
replaces it and to be able to roam about, freely choosing their tools
and their job. The quandary for the self which Foucault presents:

"How does one govern oneself by performing actions in which one is
oneself the object of those actions, the domain in which they are
applied, 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. (For at least one accredited philosopher founding an
enquiry into word processing the problem is far worse: "The anxiety of
loosing a hold on professional integrity and sinking into popular
culture must be restrained for the sake of thinking out a phenomenon we
are now living through and in which we are participating."8)

The feature mountain refutes theories of hardware determination of
software at the same time as it makes a full victimizing incorporation
of the user into the application laughably implausible. It is again as
an amalgamate - a subset of those both within and connected to the
'universal machine' - that it deserves to be worked over. The threshold
that it composes also incorporate, as well as the obvious economic
factors, compositional articulations produced by: hardware capabilities
and innovation; developments in programming languages and technique - as
well as those of the structuring and organization of such work; the
propensity of digital technologies to have arranged some form of
connection to the networks. All of these factors of course intermesh
along with the various corporate instruments used to determine and
decide upon their various and relative importance.

Objects in their place

Word is, with the rest of Office, put together using object oriented
programming. A program is sectioned up into objects - a unique
unchanging entity within the program complete with definitions of data
and operations which it is permitted to carry out. Objects can pass
messages between one another as well as being able to make requests on
other objects. Objects have a sense of how data 'behaves', therefore
each object is responsible for checking the validity and 'sensibility'
of the data that it is working with. As a result, programs made using
this approach are generally more flexible in their ability to
accommodate a variety of data types and processes. The inner workings
of the object, and interrelations between objects, are, as with most
programs, hidden from the user. However, some inkling of their function
can be gathered from what is visible at the interface and in use - in
the division of the tools up into tool bars and in the various ways in
which tools are shown to be able or not able to work on specific pieces
of data.

The relative reliability of this approach to programming makes it
particularly suitable for constructing programs that are built on
version by version rather than renewed. Its way of handling different
forms of data and activity thus has to be thoroughly coherent at all
stages. Crucially for Office, this is what allows objects to be used
across seemingly separate applications. The use of tool bars in Word is
not only predetermined by the inherent qualities of object oriented
software but by Microsoft's approach to using it. The productive part
of the company is structured into work teams with closely defined
domains of expertise and function responsible for each class of object -
for instance, each tool bar.

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. This information is allocated on the basis of
how closely it corresponds to the 'tasks' that users have come into
composition with the software to perform. The screen is divided up into
little counters clustered into groups, each of which is oriented to a
particular task. Each task may then break down into a hierarchy of
sub-tasks or further specifications as to the description of the
task. The closed world of objects and other objects interrelated
according to strict protocols is visible on screen as changes in
data-state or in the mode of the program. 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. For instance, there is a strict
division between Clip Art and Word Art in Word with the tool bar of each
only able to make changes in brightness and contrast to the material of
the other. There is an assumption built into tool bars that they
accomplish a certain wholeness in circumscribing the task that they
construct or that is translated by them into the realm of objects.

How are the tasks and the objects that compose them ordered? Several
tools are present in more than one tool bar, others can only be accessed
several layers deep into menu hierarchies. 'Animated text' for instance,
a function which (whilst unable to be converted into a web documented by
Saving as HTML) makes Netscape's <<blink> tag look classy, allows you to
add a little bit of fairyland to your text with sparkling pixels and
flickering borders. In order to animate text the user must choose
'Format' from the menu bar, select the option to format 'Fonts', and
then choose the 'Animation' level from the three types of font
formatting available. 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. Font animation is not available directly
from any tool bar, whilst the ability to specify the font, its point size
and whether it is bold, italic or underlined is deemed to be so
necessary that it is included in both the 'Formatting' and 'Ribbon'
tool bars. This of course has serious 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.

It would be possible to analyse a piece of software on the basis of
procedurally documenting every point which constitutes an event, to
record the points at which we move from one state to another or at which
boundaries are produced to certain behaviours, not merely within modes
but at every level of the software and begin to extrapolate out,
following through, from installation, to licensing agreement, to splash
screen and on into the hierarchy of functions of the actual program,
describing at each point, at each moment that constituted an event, how
it functioned as part of a series of closely interlocking fields such as
processor characteristics, operating systems, models of user behaviour,
work organization, qualities of certain algorithms, the relative status
of various document or file forms (for instance, the recent half-botched
attempt to incorporate HTML generation), the availability of class
libraries of already written code and more or less densely determinant
ones such as markets, forms of copyright, aesthetic methodologies or
trends and so on. Equally an application, especially one intent on
sucking all potential functions towards it, can be interrogated on the
basis of those functions which are absent from it. For instance, 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

One futile place to resort to for answers to such enquiries would be the
various types of Help that Word places at the disposal of the user.
There are five forms of help available from the application. Balloon
Help on the Mac is perhaps the simplest. On a simple roll-over from the
mouse on a menu item or interface component a speech-bubble appears next
to the cursor to give a short description of its use and function.
Working on a similar basis, leaving the cursor on any of the tool icons
will simply display the name of a tool. With these two, most useful
aspects of the Help in Word begin and end.

The Help menu also provides a link to initiate Explorer (whether it is
your specified preferred browser or not) to open the advice section of
Microsoft's site. The other major aspect of Help is Microsoft Word
Help. This is a simple archive of information held together by an index
and hypertextual linkages between different areas of the documentation.
Whilst it is possible to browse this resource and find information, 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 and
thus find the information - especially since Microsoft often appears to
use apparently 'simplified' versions of generally used words - such as
'jumps' in stead of hyperlinks, both instead of and alongside the more
common term. Whilst there may be a vast amount of data in the various
layers of Help to edify users with a spare hour or so it is worse then
useless to users who need a particular element of information in order
to allow them to achieve what they want to do straight away.

Microsoft Word Help is also where you end up if you fall for the ruse of
accepting help from the Office Assistant. Rocking on its heels,
whistling, getting rubik, turning into a filing cabinet, the version for
Apple computers is an economically and cutely animated Mac Plus with
Disney vermin legs. Windows users get a paperclip. Rather than offer
actual help, this takes the proposition of the digital assistant, the
low-grade Artificial Intelligence that will in the permanently
rained-off future help the user make those crucial tabulation decisions,
but settles for kewtness over function. 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 is given up on a couple of branches down the choice tree
when the user actually tries to get help from the assistant and is
dumped back in the disastrous jargon-swamp of Word Help which is what it
automatically cuts to. Office Assistant will do a few things off its
own bat if you tell it to in Preferences. But its subsequent cheery
dosing of the user's eyeballs with timely Tips about using features, the
mouse, keyboard shortcuts, means that to use Word without the winsome
little pixie switched firmly off is to be constantly prodded in the
ribs, to have your ears twisted to attention, to be told off. School
will never end.

Word processing

Sun Microsystems' Scott McNeally, responding to Microsoft's attempt to
wreck the cross-platform capability of Java claimed that they were
aiming at controlling the "Written and spoken language of the digital
age"9. 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. Something that all software bound
by the desktop metaphor has yet to do. McNeally's claim conflates two
forms of language however, the formal and the natural. It
rhetorically implies that the former should have access to the same
rights of 'freedom of speech' as the latter. In a familiar ploy for
U.S. business, Sun plays the underdog to Microsoft over what was
essentially a conflict over whose version of a standard should prevail.

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. It exists both in a two dimensional and a multidimensional
processual space. 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.

Just as freedom of speech is a convenient myth under which something
else entirely can safely be left to occur, 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
organizational 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?

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