Disclaimer: This is an essay assignment for the course “Software Studies” at Goldsmiths, University of London, from January to March 2024. Though the assignment has been rewarded the distinction by the examiner, I am fully aware this article is not good in many ways, especially in the closing section – a rewrite is underway.
“The word processor is the calculator of the humanist. Wherever knowledge must be accessed, selected, stored, and modified, the practice of writing on a computer is becoming the standard operation for information workers; word processing is no longer restricted to the narrow domain of office automation.”
Michael Heim, Electric Language : A Philosophical Study of Word Processing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 1.
When Michael Heim published the above book over twenty years ago, electric word processor applications had already fundamentally changed the writing mechanism. Writers and office workers have widely adopted[1] this new means of working with computers, keyboards alongside with screens, and several applications were populated in the market, such as WordStar (1978), WordPerfect (1979) and Microsoft Word (1983).
However, nowadays, writing technologies and their existing conditions have changed dramatically, leading to a growing complicated situation – computational devices are pervasive, languages and protocols for software programming are booming, networks are permeating every corner of the world, and enormous amounts of data are generated every second. It is in this circumstance that people are more dependent on technology, voluntarily or unwillingly. Thus, new kinds of software applications that “accessed, selected, stored and modified”[2] information have emerged, shaping our imagination of word processors.
Accordingly, this essay believes that the term “word processor” may not be perfectly suitable to conclude today’s spectacle of a series of software objects in which information is inputted, remembered, structured, arranged and shared. At present, at least from my personal experience, multiple software is utilised to jot down information and express ideas, but the word processors mentioned above are rarely used or will merely be used under certain circumstances like writing this essay or other linear texts.
Therefore, this essay will not solely focus on the old-school word processors but also on another type of word processor that is more floating, fragmented, modulated and relational. This essay sees them as “data organisers” instead of “word processors” because the words, sentences, paragraphs, as well as attached images and files, are constructed and positioned distinctively between these two kinds of software, though texts are identical by their looks on screens and these software are operating based on the same binary logic and hardware structures.
In particular, this essay will examine one prominent case of “data organisers” named Notion. The non-opensource software was developed by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last in 2016[3], and its estimated valuation has reached 10 billion in 2021[4].
Previously and At Present
When it comes to turning thoughts in our minds into languages that do not vibrate the air, we resort to writing. Clearly, there are multiple mediums for this – from classic papers and pens to modern but dead typewriters and today’s series of computational devices.
This essay considers the previous mediums as three discrete steps in the transforming writing technologies, but not to the extent of regarding them as separated and isolated phases. For one thing, these steps are discrete because they are built on distinctive ways of manipulating words, sentences and passages, just as Heim has summarised: “first through manual, external manipulation of phonetic symbols (writing), then through mechanical symbol manipulation (printing and typewriting), and finally through a superior kind of automated manipulation on computers.”[5] For another, such discrete steps should not be treated entirely separately since it is those inconsistencies, ruptures, or differences themselves that aboded in transitions are critical factors in the discussion of how software objects like Notion interact with analogue writing and printing and provoke further investigation of how such software assemble themselves and what kinds of roles they play when users are using them.
Therefore, neither this section nor the essay is meant to conceive a narrative that explains the transition from writing to printing and eventually to writing on computational devices. Instead, this section describes the previous practices of word processing, primarily typewriters and other computerised word processing paradigms, and tries to compare them with contemporary word processing software, finding its discreteness and continuities.
Retrospective typewriters
On the surface, typewriters are simple to use: the keyboard is designed to receive inputs, the typebar and ribbon are designated to print letters, and the carriages are responsible for holding and moving the paper according to the set margins and spacings[6]. That is it, and no more mechanisms are involved. However, under the surface, typewriters are dedicated and complicated machinery. Whenever a typewriter enters a character on the typewriter, a series of mechanical movements start to function, and more importantly, they are interrelated. Each stoke of keys drives a sequence of gears, rachet, springs, winds and other components to move; a signal stoke not only lifts the typebar to hit the paper but also drags the colour ribbon to roll, the carriage to move from left to right, and gears underneath the carriage to spin to make the crispy “ding” sound informing the typist it’s time to start a newline[7].
What cannot be ignored here is that no matter how simple or dedicated this machine is, it always starts with paper and ends with paper. Let’s set up a scenario when you are a clerk and about to use a typewriter to finish your work. The first thing you would do, in most cases, is to insert a piece of paper into the carriage and make sure it’s properly installed to avoid paper jams or misalignment between the frames of paper and blocks of text. After your desired margins and spacings are adapted, you start typing. During this process, you have to pay close attention to hitting the correct keys on the keyboard because you don’t want to waste your paper and time starting over. You, as a person dealing with words, might feel words are emerging out of your mind, and the typewriter is integrating into your body when working with them. Still, it is this sudden moment of misspelling that the materiality of paper calls you back – once the character has been printed on the paper, it stays on the paper physically and eternally, making it impossible to physically erase the already-printed character from the paper. Even with the most advanced typewriters, such as the IBM Selectric series, the correction feature is achieved by covering the typo with a white correction tape and then printing the new word. After several productive hours, you carefully take out the paper and then hand it over to someone else who needs it.
Indeed, there is no doubt that typewriters changed how people work and how people express their ideas. Friedrich Kittler, one of the key scholars in media studies, identified typewriters as having the power of blindness to flatten the authenticities and the authorships of handwriting. By arguing that typewriters are a kind of “device for everybody”[8], Kittler underlines the blindness of typewriters, which not only “bypasses a whole system of education”[9] that desexualises the male and female in the office working environment, but also free man from quill and women from needle, transforming them into “employable employees”[10]. It is also this kind of blindness but at its physical meaning (you can’t see what you have typed on paper in this model of typewriter), helped Friedrich Nietzsche to bypass his severe eye issues and become one of the first philosophers who adapted typewriters to write scholarly works in 1882, resulting to his later words: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”[11]
However, blindness cannot conceal the moment of retaining and recalling a paper mentioned previously. Typewriters eliminate gender segregation, styles, and the sacredness of handwriting, but not the materiality within the operation of writing. This job is completed partly later by word processing software built for computerised devices and, even further, by their distribution.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is how my generation, or at least from my personal experience, plays with words on modern computers when “data organisers” were not introduced to the market in recent years.
Suppose you can still recall what this essay has talked about typewriters. In that case, you might remember that it emphasises the materiality of paper and argues that it retains a moment of revealing the holes of immersion for typewriters. Word processing software developed for laptops and desktops like Microsoft Word has solved the problem of paper, which, in consequence, faded the materiality. Nonetheless, in reality, the materiality does not disappear but is ported to somewhere else, where it is not as physical as a piece of paper held in your hand or presented in front of you – it slides into the electronics in your key switches, screens, memory systems and binary digits on almost every computer where you cannot see, and later, it proliferates into the network.
Before discussing them in more detail, it is necessary to revisit typewriters. Though typewriters are unfamiliar to my generation, even if I have never had or used one since I was born, they are always haunted in my experience when using word processing software like Microsoft Word. This argument mainly comes from the embodiment process of experiencing typing. The story also comes from Nietzsche’s time, when an American experimental psychologist recorded his experience adapting his hand and fingers to the keyboard on typewriters and noted: “25th day. […] Location (muscular, etc.), letter and word associations are now in progress of automatization. […] 38th day. To-day I found myself not infrequently striking letters before I was conscious of seeing them. They seem to have been perfecting themselves just below the level of consciousness.”[12] The text not only implies blindness (how eyes are no longer needed to look at the keyboard) but also stresses the embodiment and body integration of keyboards. No wonder why there are a large number of people who use a clicky and tactile mechanical keyboard that is very similar to the typing experience on typewriters and provides a sense of confirmative feedback to be more connective with the computer and faster when typing.
Get back to Microsoft Word. It is vital that such embodiment and integration are fostered deeply by the cause of Microsoft Word, thanks to the withdrawal of the materiality of papers. Notably, though this kind of word processor software also requires users to adjust margins and spacings as typewriters, they get more freedom and affordances of manipulating texts. Papers in Microsoft Word are virtual and digital, represented by a screen that has a 60Hz or more refresh rate, meaning that what is displayed on the screen is continuously changing 60 times per second, which is obviously not perpetual and highly versatile. Users with Microsoft Word or similar word processing software can correct any typo, adjust margins and spacings, and undo and redo any time when needed without bothering to change the paper and start over. As Heim has summarised: “This is bliss. Here is true freedom. No more cutting paper and pasting, no more anxiety over revisions. Now I can get to work without the nuisance of typing and re-typing.”[13]
The software cannot be granted such competencies solely by the screens. Behind it is an integrated system[i] principally comprised of what this essay has mentioned and where the materiality has slid into: keyboards, screens, memory systems and binary digits throughout the process. Keyboards have ceased to be fully mechanical and time-consuming (typewriters expect the pressing force from fingers to lift the typebar and travel a distance before it hits the ribbon and print letters to a paper; therefore, typists on classic typewriters have to wait for a letter to be printed and then go on to the following letter), but detect the changes of electric current of each key and map signals with a certain keycode, then transmit them to computers[14] – all these procedures are done in the form of binary digits and run faster than a blink of the eye. Memory systems in modern computers pertain to storage devices ranging from long-term storage, such as hard disk drives (HDD) and solid disk drives (SSD), to temporary storage, namely random-access memory (RAM). In particular, HDDs and SSDs allow a text file produced by Microsoft Word or other word processing software to be stored (for MS Word is a .docx file), being read and rewritten later when needed – papers have been digitally transformed, maintaining the texts and formats in the form of binary digits and each time when the user reopens and edits it, they modify the same file and hence a same sheet of paper. Secondly, RAM has a much faster read-and-write speed even compared to SSDs, and therefore, they are utilised while data, constitutionally binary digits on computers, needs to be exchanged promptly, which is when the word processor is working at the front and being used by users. What is essential for RAM is that adequate RAM storage is the foundation of a “smooth” typing experience, and such experiences include but are not limited to shorter waiting times between entering and displaying the character and quicker response times when adding, deleting, or autocorrecting texts, as well as altering fonts, alignments, styles, margins, spacings, and more functions to the texts – these are the features and functions that refine the integration and embodiment of word processors through instant and responsive feedback along with the freedom provided by word processors discussed earlier. Lastly, binary digits are existing everywhere, from keystrokes users have typed to the visuals shown on screens and files saved on hard drives, just as what has been described above.
All in All, Microsoft Word and similar word processors have inherited some aspects of modes of composing texts from typewriters, including the necessities of managing layouts (such as margins and spacings) and the ways of input (via keyboards), but on the other hand, they have freed their users from the hassles of corrections and revisions by adopting digitalisation and virtualisation approaches. Microsoft Word, however, is still a word processor rather than a data organiser. Because it relies on a single file stored on computer disks[ii], which cannot change how they are viewed or create links to other notes and data formats, and therefore this essay will discuss the “data organisers” that have evolved from Microsoft Word.