of new technology.
Andrew Rudd - published in Computer Education. November 2003
‘Word-processors create an appalling waste of time and paper; they have made it impossible now to buy, or get, parts for, a decent typewriter.’ Antony Black Letter to the Guardian
‘…the computer makes things light; the lead and paper of my craft are dissolved into electronic weightlessness… Man, beginning as an animal among animals, hunted and hunting, once shouldered the full dark fatality of nature. Taming other beasts to his use, taming wild plants to a settled agriculture, inventing devices to multiply his own strength and speed, he has gradually put an angelic distance between himself and matter. It is human to regret this leave-taking; our aesthetic sense has earthy roots. Computer-set type, for instance, is faintly ugly and soulless, compared with the minuscule irregularities and tiny sharp bite that metal type pressed into the paper. In turn, manuscript inked into parchment had an organic vitality and colour that type only could weakly ape. But we cannot go back, though we can look back; we must swim, like angels, in our weightless element, and grow into the freedom that we have invented.’
John Updike Odd Jobs.
‘A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter…
Umberto Eco Foucault's Pendulum
The writer prepares to write, going into an office, or a corner reserved for writing. Writers value this space, its predictability, its safety. It may be a desk surrounded by books, it may have an atmosphere created by familiar objects, music may be playing. But these days the writing process often includes a computer, a very different artefact which has its own impact on the process of writing. Now, as well as the physical space to write in, the writer also operates in various virtual spaces. Among these we can recognise the small ‘room’ of the word processor, and the enormous ‘room’ of the Internet..
Using a pencil or pen, it is clear that the medium has some effect on the process – in the clarity of the writing, the tension expressed in pressure and hand grip. The tool seems almost an extension of the finger, words flow from the mind and appear on the page. Using a typewriter interposes a certain formality. In ‘typing up,’ the seismic information in the hand-written document is ironed out. Its crossings-out, flourishes, its almost illegible speed-writing –clues to the writer’s state of mind, information which exists ‘between the lines’ – all these disappear in typing. To many writers, as a manuscript approaches completion, this marks a conscious move away from private space towards the public arena. If the first instrument the writer uses is a word-processor, these moves are no longer present.
The very act of reading and writing on a screen is fundamentally different from the medium of book or paper. As McCullough points out in a fascinating book, there is no sense of touch, or intimate contact with material. The actions of the writer have also changed:
the hand's role is diminished overall: exertions of force become quite monotonous, and the capacity to probe goes almost entirely unused… Traditionally, hand, eye, and tool converged in one place: when the hand worked a material, the eye followed it continuously; or the hand held a paper, while the eye read. Now the hand moves a mouse while the eyes look at a screen… for processes that work a material, hand-eye union has always been essential. (McCullough, 1998. p.34)
A pencil or pen, or even a typewriter, seems to have little effect on the content of what is written, but word-processing is not so value-free. The word-processor is a room with furniture, and at a screen the writer is surrounded by all kinds of hidden agendas. A piece of software is a cultural product, just as much as a painting or a film: and as such, it communicates and expresses ideas, either implicitly or explicitly.
Programs such as word processors are described as generic or content free software, unlike those designed to convey direct information: databases, encyclopaedias, simulations and so on. This is something of a misnomer: there is no such thing as ‘content free’ software. All software comes with built-in expectations and limitations imposed by the designers and programmers, and these have a profound effect on the way the software is used. A graphical interface such as Windows uses symbolic structures which are not arbitrary or accidental –they enshrine presuppositions and values. We may be unaware of these, but they will have their effects.
On the computer screen on which I am writing this, the Microsoft Word menu bar runs along the top. The first items on the menu and tool bar are to do with Filing: how to handle the document on the computer, how to save it, print it and so on. This is not intrinsically sinister, but it suggests that my writing is first of all to be perceived as a computer file, a programmed object. This is a message I do not receive when I work with a ‘real life’ paper and pencil document: that feels like expression first, object second.
Not only am I writing a ‘file’ rather than a piece of prose or poetry, but the electronic ‘paper’ is an interesting medium. ‘Real’ paper leaves smudges, visible traces of my revision, but if I delete one of these words it is obliterated finally and absolutely. The word processor funnels me towards finality, towards closure, my process is largely irrelevant. If I want to keep notes and drafts, I have to make special provision, saving multiple copies of files with different names (doc1, doc2, doc3) or italicising jottings to come back to.
There is no reason why a screen should not have spaces or margins for doodling, trying out ideas, jotting, but these activities do not have any priority here. Or to put the matter more precisely – the thinking of the software designer does not give these activities priority – for no software arises by accident. It reflects the mind of its maker. This word-processor is packaged quite literally as a ‘productivity tool’ and such ‘playing with language’ —however intrinsic to the process of creativity—is not part of the content or culture. Could this be one of the reasons why word-processors are still used in educational settings to create fair copies for display, rather than becoming a safe space for developing writing?
Newer versions of Word—I typed newer there, but Word corrected it to ‘Newer’ observing that I was starting a new sentence—will put right many mistakes as you type. At its best this can be like having an expert friend sitting beside you. You can turn to this friend and say ‘how do I do this?’ and get immediate help. That is the idea behind that most irritating invention: the ‘office assistant’. Type ‘Dear Sir,’ and press Return. Up pops a peculiar animated paper clip with the message ‘You appear to be writing a letter… can I help you?’ Why is this feature so universally disliked? I think it must be the condescension, the unpleasantness of being ordered about by a machine, as well as the unwarranted assumption that you would like to be interrupted in the intimate space of your writing.
Many more subtle interventions will occur without you even noticing. Type THe and your error will be corrected, quickly and silently. I’m relaxed about this because I know what’s going on, but it does bring up some interesting issues. Try writing a poem with lower case letters at the start of each line: after you have changed two or three from the imposed capitals, the computer gets the message and leaves you alone, but it’s an effort. The designer of the program obviously ‘thinks’ poems should have a capital letter at the beginning of each line.
The delicate balance between the user and the designer is of central importance. It is vital for the humanising of computers that the user should not only be in charge of decision making but feel in charge. It is useful to have an expert friend beside you, but very discouraging if that expert wrests the mouse out of your hand and does things for you. Sometimes the computer may act like a secretary who appears to take dictation but in fact changes what you have written, adding items which were not meant to be there. The best software enables you, the user, to do things you could not do on your own. ‘Commands’ available to the user imply that a servant is ready for your call: ‘draw me a box, so big,’ we say, or ‘write all that again, this time bigger.’ The software defines a creative space, a zone where certain things are easy to do which would otherwise be difficult. It is important to be critically aware of this: the sheer expertise of the system seduces us into thinking that we are free to do anything, whereas it is always nudging us in certain directions.
Is there any way in which software can be made more amenable to the writer, to creative choices? I would like to see these choices presented in a much more explicit way. When you install a program, ‘content choices’ or ‘writer’s preferences’ should be offered, allowing you to create your own working environment, to determine the ‘culture’ of your computer use.
Compared with certain other programs, however, Microsoft Word seems relatively free of directive content. Publisher offers a huge collection of ‘Wizards’ which enable you to generate publications—from news-sheets to Christmas cards—merely by choosing from a series of design options. While this can be useful, it betrays a severely product-oriented view of writing, where the printed artefact is all-important. Professional-looking publications appear without thought or creativity. The computer is doing the job and deskilling the human being. Writing has more to do with process than product.
Thus a ‘productivity tool’ may be less appropriate for the writer than a piece of software designed to encourage the tentative stages of the writing process. Microsoft Word has moved significantly in this direction. The undo tool now allows you to re-trace your steps through a whole history of revisions and deletions in your document, so process is not so irretrievably lost.
The newest versions also incorporate an element of ‘learning from the user.’ If you never use a particular tool it will disappear from the tool-bar and so on. A piece of software should be so well designed that it is easy to use, it should be as simple and powerful as a pencil. The bookshop shelves filled with ‘Idiot’s Guides’ and two thousand page Manuals suggest that software design has a long way to go. Computers are not difficult, but have often been designed to be so. The look of computer screens has been dominated by the ideas of the late 1980s, particularly the Graphical User Interface (GUI) developed by Xerox and Apple. This included ‘windows’ to look at things, ‘icons’ to represent activities and collections of data, ‘menus’ to provide choice and reduce the visual clutter, and the use of ‘pointers’ such as the mouse. Such computer screens are now ubiquitous, and a huge improvement on the densely complex text command systems which preceded them. There is no reason, however, that computers should not be controlled by voice, by eye or hand movements, so that the priority of the visual might not be so overwhelming, and the computer ‘room’ become a more human, creative environment.
The writer also works in another new space: the vast room of the Internet, which is only now beginning to be defined. It is a library of information, disorganised, chaotic, but containing rich and valuable texts randomly scattered among the shelves. It is a huge shopping mall where almost anything can be bought, and the street cries of the vendors make it hard to concentrate, to achieve stillness and reflective thought. It is a telephone exchange humming with connections and possible conversations between any remote parts of the world. Above all, it is a television station broadcasting millions of programmes in an electronic replay of the Tower of Babel.
So how does it feel as a working space for the writer? As the Internet is a much-vaunted source of information, the writer can ‘access’ or acquire all kinds of things to assist in writing. Search engines such as Google have become the most essential sites: catalogues to the inchoate library of the Net. They may employ ‘agents’ or ‘spiders’ –small software entities which travel around the Internet, following links, mapping all its pathways and destinations. The map they create can be consulted, as an Ordnance Survey sheet can be used to plan an excursion. Search engines will return results, often in millions, to your words or phrases. Michael Joyce, an author of ‘hypertext fiction,’ observes that search engines are becoming the new structure of the Internet, ‘the medium itself.’ ‘Everywhere’ he says ‘there's a cry for better filters as if the point of making coffee is to keep out the grounds, not whether it tastes any good. People read links rather than sites.’ (in Snyder, 1998. p. 168)
Results are organised according to several criteria. One of these is the frequency of words – a site with the search term ‘poetry’ mentioned 100 times will come higher in the list than one with only 10 mentions. This crude device is easy to manipulate – a site may have a hidden word repeated 1000 times and so spuriously increase its ranking. Search engines have therefore developed more sophisticated ways to give results priority. Google measures how much sites are used – a popular site will move up the ladder, a site to which other sites set up links will be given ‘added value,’ a ‘high value’ site linking to another gives it even more value, and so on. The Internet gradually creates its own system of values, its canon, its hierarchies of information, and gradually comes to resemble the world of books, where a ‘serious’ text may be distinguished from a shopping list by the semiotics of publishing. Some search engines use a simpler approach – those who pay to be listed get their sites returned more conspicuously. Much of this is concealed from the casual user – my point is that it has a huge impact on the quality of information recovered, its bias, its preoccupations. A writer working in this room is in a new and insinuating cultural environment.
The Internet, for all its vastness, only contains certain kinds of texts. A small local branch library will hold much that is entirely absent from the Internet –modern fiction, for example, or children’s literature: even the video collection. The Gutenberg project has made available an impressive list of pre-twentieth century texts, and the Internet is a wonderful source of certain kinds of information. According to Clifford Stoll, a gloriously negative commentator on the Web:
When I dug a sewer in my backyard, I needed to know the correct slope for a sewer. I decided to go online and search the Web. I started the browser running, but couldn't find the answer to this obvious question. I went to my public library, got a copy of the Uniform Plumbing Code, the UPC, looked it up, and there it was, a damned useful piece of information. What did I find online? I found thousands of obsolete programs but I couldn't find anything about plumbing. (in Brockman, 1996, p. 283)
Because the Internet is largely self-published, it reflects the enthusiasms of its creators. Its very immediacy and relevance to one person make it irrelevant and useless to another. An experienced Internet user cultivates a new literacy, finding pathways through the city which bypass distractions and dangers to visit those places which have proved useful and reliable. Such skills take time to develop. For the writer, one of the best things about the Internet is the way it supports the ‘traditional’ culture of bookselling, by on-line catalogues, book searches, on-line purchasing. To type an ISBN into Amazon, click to order and receive a book three days later is an extraordinary facility.
For poetry, the Internet provides a wide-ranging resource. Short poetry is easy to type and publish on-line. A few years ago while driving I heard a poet interviewed on Radio 4. She had won the Nobel Prize, but I did not catch her name. Ten minutes of searching found Wyslava Symborska. In five more minutes I had the text of twenty of her poems, and the following week I bought her book. This seems to me a paradigm of the support which the Internet offers to poetry publishing.
The Internet is a branch of television, a medium which broadcasts material, but there are many opportunities for the writer to work in the opposite direction. Email combines the immediacy of the telephone with the reflectivity of letter writing. It remains possible to use email without cost, a fact which has also enabled the ‘spamming’ which may destroy it in a few years. So the writer’s room extends to contact any number of guests, anywhere in the world: building up an address book, a network of contacts, a personal configuration of cyberspace.
Of course, the Internet also allows publication. As a publisher, the Internet has no ‘slush pile’ – it is the slush pile. It is now very easy for anyone to create websites and make them available throughout the world. There is a devaluation involved in this. Stoll again:
people who have valuable things to say that others are willing to pay money to hear will publish in print. Those who have things to say that have least value, the least commercial value, will publish for free, online! (in Brockman, 1996, p. 282)
but it is also clear that some work of high quality will be created which exists solely in the web environment, and this work will be able to reach wider constituencies which may not overlap with traditional readerships. The very nature of hypertext structures, of linking texts in any direction with other texts, the different kinds of reading required, all have possibilities for the writer. Michael Joyce sees
writing as spatially as well as temporally represented while remaining aware that closure and coherence are only local and contingent representations. We begin to see ourselves in where we are. We experience writing as what the poet Charles Olson called ‘field composition.’ (in Snyder, 1998, p. 174)
So that the processes of writing in the ‘room’ of the Internet themselves encourage new experiment, new forms, appropriate to our post-modern sensibility. Michael Joyce again:
in response to those who claim that the so-called MTV generation has no attention span, …in an age like ours which privileges polyvocality, multiplicity and constellated knowledge, a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings. (in Snyder, 1998, p. 179)
The new rooms in which the writer now works are filled with dangers, surprises and many treasures. It is vital for the writer to be aware of these.
McCullough, Malcolm (1998). Abstracting Craft: The Practiced (sic) Digital Hand. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Snyder, Ilana (Ed.) (1998). Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London and New York: Routledge.
Stoll, Clifford in Brockman, J. (1996). Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite. London: Orion Business Books.