THE CORRUPT COMPUTERElectric Language:A Philosophical Study of Word Processingby Michael Heim(Yale University Press, 305 pp,, $19.95)

The computer lets you write easily forthe same reasons it lets you write badly.A blank sheet of paper contains far moreterrors than a blank computer screen.The blank page offers nothing but emp-tiness, silence, and dread. The blankscreen glows with anticipation of thewords it so readily accepts. No one but asolitary writer can fill the vacancy of theblank page. The computer itself is al-ways ready to fill the screen with menus,messages, or instructions as soon as youtouch a key. The screen asks little from awriter. You can fill it by typing fewerwords than are needed to fill a five-by-eight card.

And behind the screen stands the in-visible order of a word-processing pro-gram with its promise of regimented safe-ty. Like any tyrant, a word-processingprogram both threatens and comforts.Obey its arbitrary inflexible rules, and itrewards you with tireless service in re-arranging, removing, even correctingyour words. Disobey its rules, and it re-sponds either by issuing a warning beepand a terse instruction or by dissolvingmonths of labor into scattered electrons.In millions of offices, the computer ful-fills the tyrant's dream: it forbids every-thing that it does not permit.

When you work at a computer, youaccept constraints as strict as barbedwire and watchtower. The screen's flick-ering energy captures your attention andnarrows it to the screen's confines. Onlythe most determined will can shift its fo-cus from the active screen to the staticwaste of books and papers that liearound it. When you work at a typewrit-er, it takes no effort to look from thepage you are writing to the pages youhave written already. You read the pageon the desk and the page in the type-writer with the same eye movements,and your pupils need not adjust tochanges in the intensity of light. Butwhen you work at a computer, the lightand action on the screen overwhelm notonly the words on any printed pagesnearby, but also the meaning of thewords on the screen itself. The glow be-comes more fascinating than the content.

Just as the dullest television soap operacaptures your attention in a darkenedroom, so the dullest prose glitters irre-sistibly on the word-processing screen.

But within its guarded borders, thecomputer screen can seem like a play-ground that grants infinite freedom.Don't look outside, don't question therules, and you can play forever andwithout rebuke. Inside the screen, nomilestones, no boundaries, no landmarksgive any sense of rhythm, limit, or loca-tion. When you work on paper, youmust pause at the end of each page andtake the trouble to start again on anoth-er. The top and bottom of a sheet of pa-per are its unmistakable beginning andend, and you always know where youare. But when you work at a screen, youmight as well be anywhere. You write onan imaginary surface with no beginningand no end. You can add anything with-out effort or interruption, Aristotlemight have defined the dramatic plotswritten at a computer as having a mid-dle, a middle, and a middle.

With typed or handwritten pages youcan easily compare the beginning andthe end for logic and consistency, or youcan examine a dozen pages on a desk atonce. With a computer, after much dis-tracting effort, you can display a fewlines from two or more sections of yourwork on the screen at the same time, butthe effect is like studying a mural bycomparing two brush strokes. The com-puter lets you forget while you writethat a skeptical reader will someday readyour prose in print and be able to turneffortlessly from one page to another,filling the margins with ironic commentson your forgetfulness and illogic. Thecomputer lets you make small-scale revi-sions to individual sentences with anease unimaginable on paper, but it can'thelp you revise the shape of the large-scale work whose scale it encourages youto forget.

Every writer should have one anyway.If you compose a first draft on paper andthen revise a final draft on the computer,you can combine structural solidity andelegance of detail in the same piece of

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work. And two kinds of writing alwaysturn out better when drafted entirely ona computer. Anything shorter thanaround a thousand words (the exactthreshold differs for every writer) gainsfrom the ease of correction. And any-thing written For a newspaper gains fromthe ease with which paragraphs can beshuffled from one place to another. Re-porters use the inverted-pyramid con-struction, in which the weightiest factoccupies the opening paragraph and ev-erything else follows in diminishing or-der of importance. A computer lets ajournalist spew out paragraphs pell-melland shift them up and down the pyra-mid at will. And it lets an editor cut offthe story at any point without leavingloose ends.

But with any extended prose thatseeks to analyze or comprehend, anynarrative that recognizes the link be-tween act and consequence, any writingthat knows that lives can have purposeor direction, any words that seek to in-fluence or illuminate, the computer easesthe mechanical task of compositionwhile quietly undermining coherenceand truth. The author who producedbooks, when he worked on paper, thatwere lucid and compact now sits at acomputer and writes flaccid maunder-ings that convince no one. When heworked on paper, he discovered that aforced and tendentious argument gavemore trouble in the writing than a validone; when the sentences were agonizingto write, the content was probablywrong. Now that he has a computer, hewrites everything easily, and is con-vinced by any self-contradictory non-sense that he tosses on the screen. Onthe writing desk, as on the stock tradingfloor, the computer gives wings to highflyers—until the crash.

WRITERS WHO use a computerswear to its liberating power in

tones that bear witness to the apocalypticpower of a new divinity. Their convictionresults from something deeper than meregratitude for the computer's conve-niences. Every new medium of writingbrings about new intensities of religiousbelief and new schisms among believers.In the 16th century the printed bookhelped make possible the split betweenCatholics and Protestants. In the 20thcentury this history of tragedy and tri-umph is repeating itself as farce. Thosewho worship the Apple computer andthose who put their faith in the IBM PCare equally convinced that the other

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camp is damned or deluded. Each cultholds in contempt the rituals and thelaws of the other. Each thinks that it isitself the one hope for salvation.

Each of these cults corresponds to oneof the two antagonists in the age of Ref-ormation. In the realm of the AppleMacintosh, as in Catholic Europe, wor-shipers peer devoutly into screens filledwith "icons." All is sound and imageryin Appledom. Even words look like dec-orative filigrees in exotic typefaces. Thegreatest icon of all, the inviolable Appleitself, stands in the dominating positionat the upper-left comer of the screen. Acentral corporate headquarters decreesthe form of all rites and practices. Infalli-ble doctrine issues from one executiveofficer whose selection occurs in a sealedboardroom. Should anyone in his curiaquestion his powers, the offender is ex-communicated into outer darkness. Theexpelled heretic founds a new company,mutters obscurely of the coming age andthe next computer, then disappears intosilence, taking his stockholders withhim. The mother company forbids fi-nancial competition as sternly as it stiflesideological competition; if you want touse computer programs that conform toApple's orthodoxy, you must buy acomputer made and sold by Apple itself.

A IN Protestant Europe, by contrast,where sects divided endlessly into

smaller competing sects and no churchdominated any other, all is different inthe fragmented world of IBM. Thatrealm is now a chaos of conflictingnorms and standards that not even IBMcan hope to control. You can buy a com-puter that works like an IBM machinebut contains nothing made or sold byIBM itself. Renegades from IBM con-stantly set up rival firms and establishstandards of their own. When IBM re-cently abandoned some of its originalstandards and decreed new ones, manyof its rivals declared a puritan allegianceto IBM's original faith, and denouncedthe company as a divisive innovator.Still, the IBM world is united by its dis-trust of icons and imagery. IBM's screensare designed for language, not pictures.Graven images may be tolerated by themore luxurious cults, but the true IBMfaith relies on the austerity of the word.

A religion gives fanatics something tobe fanatical about, but it also sustainsand codifies the moral principles bywhich fanaticism might be judged. Acomputer encourages fanatics and doesnothing to restrain them. Religious his-

torians will have no trouble identifyingthe varieties of computer fanaticism. Atone end of the scale is the ascetic stylite,who renounces the disorder of humanityto stare raptly at the screen. At the otherend is the technological visionary, whorants endlessly about the utopia that willbe ours when the computer comes intoits kingdom.

Technological visionaries devise gleam-ing prisons that they imagine as the idealsociety, and they cannot be shaken fromthe delusion that everyone will want tolive there. The leading example of anearlier generation of visionaries wasBuckminster Fuller, who never stoppedtalking about dymaxion houses and geo-desic domes. Fuller's successor is TedNelson, whose 1974 Computer Lib/DreamMachines—two books bound back toback—has just been reissued by Tempus(a branch of Microsoft Press) with mer-ciful cuts by the author, and a blurb byTimothy Leary. Nelson never stops talk-ing about "hypertext," which is a way ofstoring information in a computer sothat you can jump from one item to anyother item remotely associated with it,until you reach a state of total befuddle-ment. Hypertext is designed for peoplewhose attention span is no wider than acomputer screen. If you want to moveinstantly from an economic analysis ofdiamond mines to a picture of a baseballdiamond to a recording of "DiamondsAre a Girl's Best Friend," hypertext isfor you. Nelson is convinced that hisplan to convert all human knowledgeinto hypertext has been blocked only bynarrow-minded bureaucrats and otherunidentified spoilsports, and he devotesmany pages of his new edition to the co-nundrum that if Ted Nelson is so smart,why isn't he rich?

Technological visionaries can neverrecognize the distinction between thefeasible and the desirable. If a machinecan be made to perform some dazzlinglycomplicated task, then the visionary as-sumes that the task is worth performing.The moral silliness of computer visionar-ies is a benign version of the moral stu-pidity that drives nuclear engineers toinvent bigger and better bombs.

IN Michael Heim's Electric Language, thefirst philosophical study of word pro-

cessing, all these issues are either fum-bled or ignored. The fault probably isn'tthe author's. His project was doomedfrom the start for two reasons: the bookwas written on a word processor, and it isa work of academic philosophy. A work-

man is no better than his tools, and thetools of philosophy and the computerprove hopelessly unequal to Heim's task.Heim never seems to notice that anythingis wrong, but that is because he denieshimself the use of any instruments exceptthose that conceal the problem.

Heim's argument, when detached fromall his philosophical throat-clearing, issimple. Books used to be created by au-thors who contemplated their ideas inprivate. This was a good thing. Comput-ers replace the contemplation of ideaswith an automated manipulation ofwords, while those words are linked toall other words through electronic net-works. This is a bad thing. Yet its bad-ness is mitigated by the fact that Heimfinds computers fun to play with. Theybeep at him amusingly, and "it is nearlyimpossible to avoid some amount offooling around with the power of pro-grammed, automatic writing."

1IKE MOST recent work in academicJ philosophy. Electric language takes

far more interest in itself and in philoso-phy than in its ostensible subject. Heimnever misses a chance to remind us thathe is writing on a computer—in fact, ontwo computers. (He took one of them tothe Acropolis so that the opening wordsof the book could report that thosewords were written on the Acropolis.)His introduction philosophizes about theproblem of introduction. His first chap-ter talks about first principles. Almosthalf the book summarizes earlier philos-ophy by Heidegger, and by the author ofHeim's dust jacket blurb, W. J. Ong, onchanges in the nature of writing.

Heim's style turns poignant when hecontemplates the solitary splendor of phi-losophy. "To seek to make connectionsfully explicit and coherent is the fate ofphilosophy, making it stand alone andapart," he writes. This sentence is typicalof Heim's style. The word "fate" is mis-placed—it belongs in the phrase aboutphilosophy's aloneness—and seems to bea euphemism for pretension or vanity.Besides, Heim's argument keeps contra-dicting itself. The Utopian cliches of theearly chapters (including an inevitablepage about hypertext) are refuted by thelater chapters' reports of research studieson the effects of computers.

Heim swallows the visionaries' guff asif it were ambrosia, and imagines thatcomputers can create a new "collabora-tive interaction" and a "gradually emerg-ing sense of a new kind of community."Three chapters later he reports that com-

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puterized message systems instead fostera "confrontational style" of insult andaggression. On one page he affirms that,whether we like it or not, "we are ap-proaching the paperless society." On thenext page he reports that one effect of thecomputer is that "far more pages are pro-duced as the ancillary function of corpo-rations and government agencies than byall the traditional book, magazine, andnewspaper publishers combined." Re-viewing his achievement at the end of thebook, he writes: "Our speculation hasstriven for consistency."

When Heim writes about the effectsof computers on writing, he alternatesbetween wide-eyed exultation at theease with which he can move sentencesaround and thin-lipped warnings againstthe division of the written word fromthe contemplating mind. Early in thebook he quotes some writers' anecdotaldescriptions of word processing but dis-misses these anecdotes as unworthy ofphilosophy. By the middle of the bookhe starts reeling off very similar anec-dotes of his own. Philosophers' anec-dotes are evidently more telling thanother people's; and no matter how fool-ish or irrelevant the answers Heim getsfrom philosophers, he keeps comingback for more.

Heim insists on obscuring even hisbetter points in a syntactical fog. For allhis concern about metaphor, he is deafto the metaphors in his own prose. Heuses the phrase "digital writing" as ifwriting at a computer meant writing inbinary digits, or as if writers had notbeen writing with their digits—their fin-gers—from the start. Heim describes theact of shuffling paragraphs around acomputer screen as "restructuring" one'sprose, a word that suggests a very dimnotion of what prose structure means.His sense of history is dimmer still. Hedevotes a chapter to the invention ofprinting and its consequences withoutmentioning the Reformation. He sum-marizes the history of Western music asa decline from "sacred chant . . . to clas-sical objective complexity to . . . the jin-gle and the hit song." If music used to beso dignified, one wonders what Shake-speare was joking about when one of hisclowns claimed to have "a reasonable earin music" and called for the tongs andthe bones.

Heim recognizes that the speed andthe ease of the computer leads to in-creased pressure to produce—pressurefrom the office worker's boss, pressurefrom the writer's superego. He intro-

duces his alternative in grand style:"Our concrete proposals for influencingself-transformation at the interface areguided by the broad paradigm of con-templative concentration as found inthe discipline called meditation." Thismeans that when you work at a com-puter, it's a good idea to stop and thinkevery now and then. Heim doesn't sayhow this solution will help the officeworker whose keystrokes are monitoredby the central computer in the person-nel office, and who will be fired ifthe keystrokes-per-hour figure doesn'tmatch the corporate quota.

The most disconcerting sentences inElectric Language were written by the Ger-man historian and theologian JohnTrithemius early in the 16th century,when the printing press, like the person-al computer today, was both new andeverywhere, Trithemius was certain thatthe printed book made learning effort-less and therefore superficial. To ap-

proach the deepest meaning of a book,he wrote, one must copy it laboriouslyby hand, as scribes do: "Every word wewrite is imprinted more forcefully onour minds since we have to take ourtime while writing and reading." Heimdoesn't notice that Trithemius on print-ing is an updated version of Plato onwriting, Plato was certain that we under-stand the words we hear more fully thanthe words we read. But Heim suspectsthat Trithemius may have known whathe was talking about. As he hurtlesthrough the hyperspace of his word-processed prose, Heim pauses in baffledtribute to this defender of the writtenword and the human hand.

EDWARD MENDELSON

Edward Mendelson is professor of En-glish and comparative literature at Co-lumbia University and a contributingeditor of PC Magazine.

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