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The Templates, sample documents that the user can edit to make their
own, with their repertoire of 'elegant fax', 'contemporary fax' to
'formal letter' or 'memo', acknowledge that forgery is the basic form of
document produced in the modern office. The purest manifestation of
this so far is 419 Fraud, named after the Nigerian Statute that outlaws
it. 419 consists of tens of thousands of letters, apparently coming
from government officials, company directors, military officers,
approaching Western bank account holders with an incredible offer. The
letters claim an insight into some impending calamity or coup and
requests that the recipient aid the senders by allowing their bank
account to be used to move capital out of Nigeria in return for a
generous commission. All that is requested is a simple downpayment.
And then another. A couple more. The entire operation is based around
faxes and letters, an industrial scale semiotics of fraud: letterheads,
confidentiality, intimations of corrupt generals, numbers in government
departments and corporate headquarters, calls to aid the world's poor,
stranded bank accounts, readily available cynicism with politics, the
ploy of the African simpleton working the racist sucker. The believable
template, hooked up to the mailing list database is an economic machine
that works all the better, all the more profitably, if it is fuelled on
fraud.

Whilst "In mechanized writing all human beings look the same"10 in the
case of templates the writing itself becomes peripheral to the
processing. Employment agencies on the net have been found to be
advertising non-existent jobs in order to pull in trade and the
appearance of market share. Tens of thousands of people respond with
their CVs. For jobs knocked up by the batchload on a CGI form come a
multitude of self-starting no-dozers with ski-lift productivity profiles
as per the thrilling careers of the templated exemplars that come with
the program.

The underlying grammar of the program conforms to that expected within
the standardized proprietary interface. The menu bar at the top of the
screen provides a list of verbs which can be actioned on the nouns
within the currently active window. These verbs are put
matter-of-factly, as tasks: File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Font,
Tools, Table, Window, Work, Help. There is the same bluntness about the
use that the program is primarily intended to be put in the sub-programs
that direct the user to produce certain kinds of documents with the
least amount of fuss: CV Wizard, Envelope Wizard, Letter Wizard. These
are the modes of writing it makes easy. Suicide Note Wizard remains
uncompleted. The Autotext tool bar already sees this easy description
begin to fray. The writer is locked into the lexical domain of 'Dear
Mom and Dad' as much as into 'Dear Sir or Madam' and 'To Whom it May
Concern'. Mailing instructions and 'Attention' lines are offered
alongside a range of closing phrases ranging from the formal to the
intimate.

Effective human-machine integration required that people and machines be
comprehended in similar terms so that human-machine systems could be
engineered to maximize the performance of both kinds of component11
Word has no direct 'interest' in information or communication, but
rather in its facilitation. It arranges things according to a
pragmatics that is not concerned so much with such as "When I say my
mouth is open how do we know that this is what I have said?", but with
sensing and matching every bit of such possible statements. The end
point of which of course is that every possible document will be ready
for production by the choice of correct template and the ticking of the
necessary thousands of variable boxes.

Michael Heim's chapter on 'The Finite Framework of Language' is
particularly good in developing an understanding of this aspect of early
Word Processing. Jargons, metaphors, descriptive leaps, constitute the
visible language of the application something that excites and mobilizes
use and exploration of the program. The language of the program
benefits from, "The ambiguity inherent in natural language which makes
possible words both sufficiently reminiscent of past usages and
semantically precise enough to indicate the new". This is not quite so
much McLuhan's medial recapitulation of past forms as much as the
problem which besets writers of Hard SF in making their scientific
extrapolations of terms and possibilities believable within currently
available nominative frameworks whilst still amounting a sense of going
beyond them. For both, the prize is the same: "As the user learns the
new system, the language installs the user in the system'12 It is at
this point that the program comes into composition with the user through
the interface.

Delete as appropriate

In 'Electronic Language' Heim uses Heidegger's term Enframement13 to
describe how the word processing software in effect runs a pre-emptive
totalizing macro on language. It is an understanding of language
captured and made into a world that describes the possibilities for its
use and conceptualization on behalf of the archetypal user. However, it
is an enframement that can never be pre-emptive or holistic enough, that
is instead reduced - or turned productively into- the ongoing site of
conflict and transference that is the interface.

The interface is the threshold between the underlying structure of the
program and the user. As a threshold it contains elements of both. The
accrual of transference from the user, their incorporation, is produced
in the ability to customize, through preferences, through macros,
through autocorrections, user dictionaries, though custom templates, but
also formulated in how users are conjured up as a class with needs that
can be met en masse.

Microsoft Word was one of the first word processors for the PC with a
decent enough graphical user interface. It made effective use of the
mouse, and indeed actually often gave people a reason to buy one for the
first time. However, after version 5.1 the program seems clearly to
have made a break with being simply a clean easy to use word processor
and became something else. The constant accrual of new tools and
functions by a software bent on self-perfection means that there are no
commands that will ever die in word, no function will ever be lost. The
Word 5.1 Tool bar is a cognitive fossil, something like a lizard brain
crawled back under the stones of higher consciousness.

Whilst not all of the interface is a disaster - you can play movies in
Word with far less clutter and brushed aluminium than you can in
QuickTime 4 for instance, there is no clear sense of why you might want
to do this, and if so, how that reconfigures the program and its
previously core focus, writing. Whilst it is clear that writing is,
under digitization, of necessity going to be displaced, it is how this
change is produced and articulated and the clarity and interrogability
of the way in which this is done that determines how well an interface
works or not. Word of course exists within the context of Office.
Here, digital writing is not simply subsumed within an uninterrupted
envelope for accessing various medial formations but articulated,
variegated and positioned by the 419 culture of doing business.

If the behaviour of writing was solely being conditioned in this respect
the problematic of why Word's interface is the way it is would be easy
to resolve. Things are also complicated by the way the software is
programmed. Alan Cooper suggests that, "Our desktop system has so many
menus and text-based dialogue boxes because all windowing systems…
…provide pre-written code modules for these functions. Conversely,
none of those systems provide much pre-written code for dragging and
dropping, which is why you see so little direct manipulation. A
dialogue box can be constructed in six or eight lines of easy,
declarative code. A drag and drop idiom must be constructed with about
100 lines of very intricate procedural code. The choice - for the
programmer - is obvious."14

The economics of software constricts it so tightly that it is bound to
repeating simply more of its past whilst churning out more, more faster
in order to deal with any perceived competition. For computer human
interface design as a discipline though, the aesthetics of the interface
is simply a matter of physiology applied, by the spadeful. Whilst there
is the minor problem of which model of human to locate as being the most
relevant to the problem, there are plenty of clip-art bodies to be
downloaded and used from the libraries of Psychology and Veterinary
Science. The traces of the psychometric, psychophysical, behaviourist
design parameters of the human organism specified in the computer's
originary conceptual infrastructure have in Word been left behind though
in the sheer painful act of concentration it takes to regurgitate all
that fearsome quantity of matter onto the screen.

A grey environment increases egg-production in chickens

The user begins to work. Everything on screen apart from the actual
contents of the focal window containing the text is lit by a continuous
light from the upper left, an upper left that remains at a constant
angle no matter how far you move something horizontally across the
screen: sunshine? Neon strip. This is an ultra-shallow
three-dimensional world granted a pixelswidth of shade to demark every
separate element. When it appears, the assistant visually addresses the
user as if they are slightly to the right and forward of where it
initially appears on screen. A perspectival cross-fire is under
construction. The user is always, but never quite accurately,
implicated as the pair of eyes that creates this by seeing. Sound
feedback is used to confirm that a process has been completed, an event
has occurred. Perhaps taking their cue from the promptings of the whirr
and tick of keyboards and hard-drives in use Word's audio-designers have
produced a series of snips, shuffles and chimes. But whilst the program
susserates and clicks politely, its sound is always in deference to a
feedback sequence that is initiated and maintained through visual
interaction.

Word's Graphic User Interface is not simply one unremitting grey
avalanche. The essential dilemma of a computer display is that: "At
every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human
and computer. Yet all communication between the two must pass through
the low-resolution, narrow-band video display terminal, which chokes off
fast, precise and complex communication"15 Microsoft's answer to this
is not unique but it is one that massively overcompensates for this
bottleneck, rather than try to develop its potential. In order to
create the fastest possible route between the human and the computer a
fast conduit to every function must be as accessible as possible on the
screen: hence many icons on many tool bars occupying much of the screen.
The question is not whether this works, it clearly doesn't. Users
simply remember a few of the icons that they use regularly and are
effectively locked out of the rest of the program.

In this respect, Tufte's data-ink ratio formulation might prove useful
if adapted slightly. The amount of information provided by an interface
can be costed against the amount of pixels in the tool bar that it
changes from the uniform background. On this reckoning different
tool bars begin to appear to be designed on quite radically different
interface conventions. The Standard Tool bar is full of 3D images,
representations of real objects, globes, magnifying glasses, cubes and
disks. There is a wide and variable use of colour (two different
magnifying glasses have different coloured handles for instance) and
even the graphic styles (compare the grey, two-dimensional scissors for
'cut' to the multicoloured three-dimensional 'paste' brush) contradict
one another. By comparison the Formatting tool bar is a rather austere
grey, black and blue. The only 3D is provided by what seems to be a
highlighter pen.

There is no particular point here in assessing which style 'works',
although the latter is far easier on the eyes in terms of peripheral
vision when in use and in terms of reading to find or guess a particular
function - since as the icons are uniform in colour, they do not suffer
from the phenomenon of brightly coloured elements (such as the arrows on
the 'Web Tool bar' icon or the circle on that for 'Drawing') becoming
visually detached from the rest of the shape. In addition to this, once
more than one tool bar is opened, "The various elements collected
together in flatland interact, creating non-information patterns and
texture simply through their combined presence"16

The fast conduit from human to computer becomes bottlenecked again
simply by the scale of potential interaction sequences. A quick way to
cut down on this would be to make sure that as OOP provides a single
identity for an arbitrary set of properties and capacities, no tool
appears in one tool bar if it is already present in another. This does
not solve the problem however. It is two-fold: that of the semiotics
of icons and of the continuing spatial organization of data in a
computing environment that has gone way beyond the capacity of the
desktop metaphor to accommodate.

Iconic languages as used in an extremely limited way in transport
information systems, or as proposed by the universalist anthropology of
Margaret Mead, are always doomed to fail, swamped at best in connotation
or more usually in disinterest. Word is not of course alone in having
too many icons. Quark Xpress for instance has an excessive number of
picture box shapes represented on the first level of its tool bar - one
would do fine, the rest being accessible via a drop-menu. To cope with
this, icons in Word are always dependent on several kinds of textual
help. Help becomes necessary solely because of the vast number of icons
that are completely inexplicable.

Within the standard noun / verb grammar of the interface, icons look too
often like nouns rather than triggers for verbs as functions, not only
do their icons and names individually fail to cohere at an isomorphic
level, their relationship to a clearer underlying system is also
diminished without any pay-off in flexibility or scope for developing
more comprehensive, structural rather than scattershot, understanding.

Digital Abundance

Despite the easy suspicion that the vast majority of the 'features' that
Word now encompasses are simply there to persuade male users that they
are not doing work that was previously relegated to female secretaries
this is not to say that there is nothing worth admiring in Word. The
sheer, useless inventive ugliness of the 'Word Art' interface
single-handedly gives the lie to the myth that allowing separate
work-groups within a project command of what they do comes to nothing
but muddle. Two dialogue boxes worth of minutely variable options given
in fantastically unrelated swirling technicolour takes some beating. A
common criticism of digital media is made that it compresses time in
order for more work to be extricated from the user. Word also has the
capacity to dilate time, and in such corners of the program we can see
the corporate imaginary of Microsoft fattening and opening up like some
blushing hungry bivalve.

At the same time as the amount of functions have increased, the menu bar
has lengthened and the depth of choice trees has increased. In
addition, as the tools become more complex, encompassing more functions,
they become more abstract. That is to say that more and more of the
tool's composition becomes devoted to monitoring and fine-tuning the
operation of the tool. The problem is, (if we are to take this route) in
finding a definition of tool. Are they metaphors, extensions, something
that 'Gives visible form and physical action to a logical operation'17
The tool perspective in computer interface design as proposed by
Winograd and Flores is an endless search for a Heideggerian route to
technology as a homing device. The idea runs that producing a
human-centred design methodology which opposes a tool-based approach to
the Death Star of Cartesianism-Taylorism allows pure form as a
manifestation of a concept or task to be mobilized in the production of
interaction design melded with thoroughly simplicity to the work and
thought patterns of its users. From this perspective the radicality of
Word lies instead in its absolute refusal of 'Dasein' the instantaneous
being there and fused-at-once with tool and act supposedly experienced
by craftsmen, bungee jumpers and users of the Apple Newton. The
typewriter and touch-typing freed writing from the control of the eye
and of consciousness (Think of the auto-save - Command S - that most Mac
users have built into them as procedural memory.) Freeing a procedure
from 'consciousness' allows it to get on with things faster. In Word,
not only can the hand not recognise the tool, but the software also
makes the generous refusal of any pretence to referral to a rational
outside world or any expectation of it.

"Take That Bass Out of Your Voice. You Talk to Me in Treble"

For Kittler 19, for Heim, and other commentators, the keyboard
profoundly effects the users access to flow. However, several more
years into the phenomenon, not only has the processuality of flow been
broken up into more and more granules, more features, on the one hand,
on the other, the more long-term acclimatization to word processing
means that this seemingly magical release of language gained by the
removal of the struggle against materials becomes normalized in
comparison to its reception by these users. Flow, as in that revealed
by an extended exposure photograph of moving water simply becomes a
form, a range of potential paths already traced out.

What presents itself as a zone of plenitude is in fact an immensely
complicated lock with hundreds of tumblers and latches, variations and
categories. At the same time, it is too easy to allow the luxury of
assuming determinism. There is no such intensity, no implicit speed or
brutality to the intersection at which the user is placed by the
feature-vectors of Word. Neither is there the languidity, coolness or a
sense of polysensual opening up of process. Rather there is a range of
positions of balance, which is not to say of comfort, but of a
neutrality a thermodynamic flatness that always has embedded within it a
number of calls to order.

The perfect text for Word is not the cutted, pasted and folded deck of
samples, nor the synthesizing torrent of a mind welling up into its
perfect receptacle but something like Pride and Prejudice. A novel sewn
together by an insect plugged into a perfunctory AI and a relational
database. It gathers its objects, makes lists, describes them, runs
protocols and observes their correlation with a limited variety of
perceptual screens. Taking advantage of integration with Excel, the
writing of realist novels could be taken to an even higher level. Once
the relevant data of income, beauty, ownership of land or title,
intelligence, relationship to trade or domestic skill, familial position
has been entered, the spreadsheet can run endlessly variable simulations.

Just as tools become tasks formulated around structured choices rather
than material potentialities, language becomes information. What is
excised from language in the mode of information is noise - what
Lecercle calls the 'remainder'20. Everything that is not only the
'junk' of language, its gibberish, but also what animates it.

Word combines both the receptive, control automating mode of software
typical of an automated production line, a traffic control centre, a
security system - systems designed to maintain a homeostatic,
conditioned level of specific flows - and the menu based channelling of
behaviour typical of the personal computer. The discussion of the
interface focussed mainly on the latter. It is quite how language is
articulated as flow that is of concern here.

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