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Interaction design to the letter
Zachary Sachs · 30 November 2007

The concession of composition from the typewriter to the computer has brought about changes very different from those of the earlier shift from script to keys. Many are inextricable from larger cultural deviations, but those that are specific to the development of this relationship are no less dramatic. Principal among those is the loss of drafts: that no record is now regularly saved between revisions is a major handicap, and the effect of this continual overwriting on historical account has been widely observed: archivists routinely bemoan the fact that researchers will unlikely be able to sort through the development of many novels or poems. What’s more, novelists and poets and essayists aren’t even able to consult their previous states. It may be a cliché that modernity has forced people ever further into an unreflective present, but it is manifest that the effect of computerized word processing on composition has taken this to its extremity, where “Save” instantly and inextricably supplants the past.

To complicate this further is the obvious risk of some error — either the software’s or the user’s — that wipes out the present work. Solutions developed for this in the ’90s (that golden era of the computer crash) culminated in Word’s implementation of “Autosave”, which rescued lazy compositors from the necessity of manually affixing their new work to disk, and made it the computer’s business to destroy every past draft. This function, obviously of great use, nonetheless lead to a proliferation of interaction designs whose variation and contradiction serve no usability purpose, whose sole function is hedging the bet on whether data will be lost — to counteract the computer’s culpability, “Revert” ostensibly returns ultimate choice to the user, but offers, at best, only a binary selection between two versions.

There are some software that allow for a record to be taken continuously and every version managed independently, but these are unusual, and the scope of their comprehensiveness leaves some questions unanswered. What, after all, ought to constitute a revision? Every keystroke? Every “Save”? It’s astonishing to think today how effortlessly the old system of handmarkings and retypings navigates this distance; it is a system that maintains both the substance of its changes and their rationale. It is a system for storing, in a sense, both data and its metadata; one which, to my knowledge, is not available in any simple and transparent way to the computer user. Even with the digital word processor’s ever-increasing multitude of functions and features, the writer’s computer interaction has not surpassed its basic, earliest state — technical revisions so far have only served to patch up the process to accommodate the inevitable crash. The typewriter, and the physical model for composition, remains — bafflingly — more complete. Frequent changes, amendments, deletions — these may entail tedium, but the convenience offered by computerized word processing comes at the price of its honesty, and is diminished incrementally with every new system introduced to correct its shortcomings.

And for the letter-writer who composes using anything less byzantine than Microsoft Word, these problems stand baldly unaddressed. Google Mail’s interaction is obviously fluky: drafts are autosaved at regular intervals, but the only options offered the user are “Save” and “Discard” — in order to effect a “Revert” it’s necessary to browse away from the page, prompting the ambiguous “lose all changes” dialog window (in which the functions of “OK” and “Cancel” are functionally, rather than literally, distinguished). If the user mistakenly chooses “Discard”, on the other hand, Gmail promptly trashes the message in toto, and its later offer to rescue the draft, of course, leaves no recourse to any earlier version.

Of course, the argument can be made that any writer interested in these issues has constant opportunity to print, save copies, upload, or otherwise iterate his drafts, and in fact has more abundant opportunity to do so. But it isn’t simply the manic or exaggeratedly dutiful writer who needs preservation; the facility of the system allows for a — I would think sizeable — majority of works to go practically unrecorded. And writers who don’t have the patience or presence of mind to keep track of more than a single draft are now eased into a position to casually undermine the long-practiced efforts of institutions that may end up with their estates.

And if this casualness gains any further ground, and the development and history of literary composition becomes an utterly unpopular cause, then we stand to inherit a world of letters that’s flattened and opaque; any dimensionality to its writing and process hammered into its final aspect: a posed object whose authority and finality are announced by the material of its existence. There, any given text’s relation its own development will be effectively imaginary.

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