revised 31/01/02
I am constantly reminded of the actions of software on my writing. The word processor underlines(* 1) words and grammatical constructions it has not been programmed to recognise in red and green. This may seem innocuous, even useful, but the corrections it suggests are often non-sensical distortions, or stylistic alternatives rather than necessary corrections. The question may then be asked who is making the stylistic decisions about the writing?(*2) This question becomes worrying when examining the bias in the choice of proper names which the spelling dictionary recognises(* 3).
Among those that are immediately labelled as suspect are Engels, (alternative suggestion: Angels) and Heidegger (headgear). The spell check has no problem accepting the name of every American president from Clinton to Taylor(*4) . Again, this seems to be a trivial geographical and political bias, hardly something to worry about. However, the cumulative effects of these habitual, mundane corrections can start to anticipate the action of writing, the red underlinings preceding and sectioning off possible modes and methods of thinking before writing.
In the first scene of George Orwell's 1984(*5), the protagonist Winston Smith finds himself unable to pen down his own thoughts in a diary. He is physically unable to write, unused to holding a pen, a result of his habitual reliance on the futuristic "speakwrite" to which he must dictate all his administrative drudge at the Ministry of Truth. He is unable even to recognise or articulate his dissent. It seems that the speakwrite is realised in contemporary software, following a long tradition of standardisation through information technology since the introduction of the printing press.
"At this point an older primary oral world is dying out in a certain sense within consciousness and a new visual-verbal world is gaining credibility. In the noetic economy, purportedly inert 'facts' rather than intrinsically evanescent sayings will have the ascendancy as never before." (* 6)
Walter Ong's writing about the shift from script to print can be transposed onto the current shift from print to electronic storage. He shows how the rationalising force of printing technologies superseded the oral tradition of sayings or indigenously transmitted wisdom. While it fuelled the educational expansion of the Enlightenment and introduced mass literacy for the first time, Ong shows how indigenous cultures and languages were steadily marginalised and eradicated by increasing standardisation.(* 7)
The first printing and wide dissemination of "correct" linguistic construction manuals and copybooks called "Commonplaces" were a feature of the Renaissance, and they can be compared in function to the contemporary use of software. These "commonplaces" contained the necessary formulas required for participation in society. They included exemplary letters ranging from how to address the butcher when paying a bill to how to invite guests to a meal or how to write to a clergyman.
This model of standardised communications is comparable to the "templates" offered by word processors: a fax, a resume, a formal letter; necessary tools for contemporary social participation. The problem is not that these forms are necessary, but that their seamless integration into software can insinuate them into the writer's intentions, disguising implicit cultural values with the anti-aliased banality of the graphical user interface.
Prior to print, scholars would read aloud, because the visual disarray of hand written script and the non-standardised, phonetic spelling of words prevented the visual formation of meaning. Meaning was created in the utterance of the words, usually in a hushed mumble. It was the silent, visual formation of meaning from the printed word that caused language to become a controlled and closed field in which the written fact rather than the spoken word holds the power to constitute truth.
This trend leads to an intrinsic conservatism in written and taught language(*8) , it forms the basis of linguistic power structures and has wider implications for the way that thought and memory are constructed.
"The effects on the accumulation, storage, and retrieval of knowledge will be vast, as will the effects on the kind of knowledge to which the mind shapes itself." (* 9)
The visual organisation of text on a page led to "units" of verbalised thought being pinned down with newly invented typographic systems. The most important effect of this ability to reliably repeat the visual organisation of information was the invention of the index. Prior to printing technology, one hundred copies of a book would require one hundred indices. The new ease with which indices of knowledge were being created in print changed methods of information retrieval, and also those of information classification. The term "index" is an abbreviation of the "index locorum communium" (the index of common places).
"The elements into which an index breaks down a book are, basically, 'places' in the text and simultaneously 'places' (topoi, loci) in the mind " (*10)
The fixing of 'topics' in the regimen of the printed index had the effect of standardising and territorialising the “common places” of thought as well as language. The regimented systems of thought that emerged in humanist philosophy are testament to this effect.
For example, Peter Ramus'(*11) dichotomised diagrams broke down 'topics' of thought into sections and sub-sections that could be applied universally. These diagrams were produced using "Solon's Law", the social/architectural theory by which classical Athens was built (*12). His hierarchical visualisation of thought processes resembles "Jackson diagram" flowcharts used to plan the design of computer programs.
In cases where the computer program is a closed, imposed system, it can have the same effect of limiting and defining the "kind of knowledge to which the mind shapes itself" as Ong ascribes to the institution of print.
This 16th Century revolution in information technology facilitated the process of the standardisation of knowledge and thought, enabling the divisive use of these technologies. The subsequent acceleration and development of information technologies in the early 20th Century has also contributed to this process.
"From 'New Vision,' 'New Typography,' 'New Architecture' of the 1920's we move to new media of the 1990's from cinema the technology of seeing, to a computer the technology of memory: from defamiliarisation' to information design."
In 'Avant Garde as Software', Lev Manovich argues that the new media and typesetting techniques of Russian and European modernists were co-opted by mainstream corporate media and finally normatized by their use in software interface design.
The aesthetic shock tactics of the Bauhaus were de-politicised and then resurrected as the didactic visual infrastructure of software. The clarity of informational layout that typified Bauhaus design [figure 1] combined with the dynamic juxtaposition of visual-contextual montage can be seen in the everyday workings of the computer operating system [figures 2 and 3].
Manovich re-phrases the title of Abigail Solomon Godeaux's essay on the capitalist co-option of modernism “From weapon to style” into “From weapon to style to instrument of labour”. Following this logic, the tools of cultural production themselves can be seen as a means of enforcing standards of expression, language and method.
Manovich often refers to the computer as the "technology of memory", a similar development as the index in the case of print. Understood as in this way, it is not only the visual, but also the structural organisation of thought and recollection that is subject to the standardising effects of information technology
The systematic organisation of digital memory on magnetic disks is an integral function of the computer operating system. The ways in which memory is stored and retrieved are therefore also subject to the manipulations of software and software producers.
In their ontological analysis of organisational systems and data structures, Joel Slayton and Geri Wittig point out the directive potential of software operating systems to control the computationally abstracted function of memory. They describe the computational representation of a "folder" that contains "files" as an autocatalytic system(* 13), the existence of one "folder" anticipating the existence of other folders, and thus prescribing the trajectories along which the growth of a computer memory system can take place.
To summarise, following the technological development of print, the aesthetic shock of modernism and digital-magnetic memory, software can be seen as powerful means of standardising language, thought and memory.
Perhaps the most worrying trend in the computer industry is the resurgence of orality under the regimen of software. Increasingly the keyboard is becoming obsolete. Speech controlled systems are already in place on telephone exchanges, and speech operated human-computer interfaces have become plausible replacements for the keyboard/mouse model. This is problematic because once the user must rely on software to interpret and transcribe speech, a grammatical construction or word that is not recognised by that software gets edited out or replaced with an "acceptable" version. Orwell's "speakwrite" is already on the market.