Computing As Writing

1) "The memex, then, was born out of a vision of research and the archive in which disciplines, bureaucracy, and professional organization are central to the nature of human knowledge. It is this focus on the organization of knowledge that makes Bush's essay such a striking break from the realities of computing at the time: here is a description of what we might think of today as a 'computer' that does not calculate but instead merely stores and organizes information. The early ENIAC computer, completed in 1946, stored only a few digits in its vacuum-tube memory as it performed one operation after another, before outputting the results to a punch card. As Paul Ceruzzi explains, 'Its purpose was to calculate firing tables for the U.S. Army, a task that involved the repetitive solution of complex mathematical expressions.' It wasn't until 1951 and the completion of the UNIVAC that computers could store and access information on magnetic tape, and even then most saw the research application of the computer to be performing large, complex scientific calculations. In this regard, Bush's description of a device for automatic storage and retrieval of information is quite a break from contemporary technology. Even more important, his emphasis throughout the device's operation is not on the mathematical calculations that kept the ENIAC busy but on reading and writing. Although today a commonplace in our interaction with computers, the centrality of writing and reading to Bush's vision of the memex is ultimately what makes it such a prescient idea."

2) "Writing has an uneasy relation to professions' emphasis on training. As Jennifer Ruth has recently argued, writing emerges out of a Victorian culture in which professions are associated with natural gifts. In other words, one becomes a writer not just by writing but by allowing an innate ability to emerge: 'this tension between doing and being structures the text's production of a credible (and credentialed) professional.' This same tension has continued today, as the rise of creative writing programs have sent mixed messages about the degree to which this skill can be taught. In his history of creative writing programs, Mark McGurl calls these 'the simple but difficult questions that have haunted creative writing programs since their inception.' Writing is the most 'professional' of the arts, and thus the profession that best balances the appeal to innate talent and trained skills. Writing also has a complex relationship to physical labor. Generally professions depend on 'their relative superiority over and distance from the working class.'"

3) "The Social Network borrows, then, narrative tropes usually used to describe the origins of works of art to represent the design and programming of an influential social media service. The computer is no longer a monolithic object that must be resisted or accepted wholesale, but is now a medium through which individuals can express their insights and personal experiences. And just as in Amadeus, the smallest differences in the nature of the work that results define its success. Salieri writes a 'March of Welcome' in Mozart's honor, and Mozart shows his great musical gifts by playing it from memory later in the scene. As he plays it, he begins to insert small variations because he discovers a spot in the melody 'that doesn't really work, does it?' These offhand and seemingly small revisions to the song fundamentally transform it, making Salieri realize bitterly the limits of his skills. Likewise, in The Social Network, the program that Zuckerberg creates is not some finished object that springs into the film's world as a whole; instead, it is refined by small insights and variations based on its creator's experiences."

4) "The memex, in other words, is less a physical device than a platform, a much broader network of thought that transcends the individual's work. From the very outset of this book I suggested that Bush's memex poses problems for how we think about our most fundamental ideas of knowledge, writing, and research. It is clear that both the imagined memex and real computers likewise challenge our ideas about tools and invention. Where the traditional (physical) tool is used to make some other thing that is ultimately independent of it—the house generally does not look like the hammer that built it—computer technologies often remain connected to the objects that they produce. Create a file in Microsoft Word and you continue to need that program to access that document; create a movie using Adobe Premier and you need, at the very least, hardware that is able to decode the file type that you have saved your work into—MPEG-2, H.264, QuickTime, and so on."

5) "Katherine Hayles argues that skeuomorphism is characteristic of 'threshold devices' that mark the transition from one conceptual model to another. For her, skeuomorphism today is particularly a response to the immateriality of contemporary life. She cites Alvin Toffler: 'the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter.' We have seen this to be a central feature of the writing-as-computer metaphor, most obviously in the way that the individual item depends on the library for its meaning. Is the Kindle book a distinct thing, or merely an item within a library? Is the individual program separated from its 'include' command a distinct thing? This broad technological system has been in tension with the small hand-held gadget since the rise of the personal computer at the end of the 1970s. The writing metaphor emerges into a system for thinking about computing most powerfully just as two seemingly opposed things happen: computers become smaller, physical, and almost personal devices, and the immaterial network relationships become a part of the everyday work of using a computer. The skeuomorphism of so much software design in the last several years reflects these central tensions in computing today. There should be little surprise that when companies want to emphasize values such as individuality, creativity, and physical ownership that appear to be in tension with 'immaterial' corporate servers and shared library resources, they most often appeal to skeuomorphism and the writing metaphor in the form of iPads and notebook computers. Ultimately, this is central to Bush's memex, as well—an object that connects to a network, a physical device that can be carried as a tool while accessing all the abstract resources of the modern computing age."

6) "These two unlikely examples of performative writing [Tom Riddle's interactive, handwritten journal in Harry Potter, and the handwritten linking books of Myst] are interestingly anachronistic in treating writing as a matter of hand penmanship. Writing in both of the texts is an example of what Charles Acland calls residual media, forms of communication that are explicitly nostalgic and obsolete. Rowling's series adopts this kind of anachronism routinely as part of its charm; the characters of the magical world of the book can do amazing things impossible in the nonmagical world but depend on technologies—like handwriting, parchment, and quills—based in the England of hundreds of years earlier. Is there a reason that Harry Potter cannot take notes with a ballpoint pen? The same is certainly true of the Myst series, whose gameplay has been frequently described as 'steampunk' for its use of Victorian-era mechanical details and design. For all that the world appears to come into existence through magic in these games, navigating the space means pushing levers, toying with devices, and riding on cable cars that could have easily been manufactured in the 1920s. The exaggeratedly traditional image of writing here does much the same work as the skeuomorphism that I noted at the end of chapter 5: it offers a model that suppresses the anxiety and tensions in the changing landscape for contemporary creative activity. Harry's quill is like Gibson's cyberspace deck or Bush's memex: a familiar physical device that nonetheless allows him to connect to an abstract, immaterial, and networked space."