From frustration to empowerment:

Developing a relaxed attitude to software and the internet:

written for a frustrated user

I feel I understand the upset you've experienced, and recognise some of the symptoms you're describing - the feeling of having spent time and money on something which doesn't produce a usable result, and the 'someone ought to do something about it' syndrome...

Of course, one's working with a whole picture, from an idea of what would be good to achieve, to the final result: and when something doesn't work, we want someone to look at the whole thing and say why... Unfortunately the electronics don't work like that, but in myriad tiny steps which together build up a whole - and I think we have to accept that we have to deal with problems in the same way.

When we buy something, we expect someone to take some kind of responsibility for its working: but I've found a totally different concept of responsibility in the computer world from what applies elsewhere... It's almost "We know that our software does this and that in our computers: if you'd like it to do it for you, you can buy it, but since we can't be responsible for which buttons you press and when, we can't guarantee that it'll do it for you, nor accept that such a failure implies that there's anything faulty with the product". Manuals and support vary from the non-existent to the 'cradle to the grave' - and aren't necessarily reflected in the price. One of my favourite programs is budget price and 'has the best support in the world': another company's programs are versatile and rather stable, but many feel that they sell too many too cheaply to give an adequate support service...

We might well think that checking that our our pages work in both in Netscape and MI Explorer means that, thereafter they would display correctly. The guys who worked out the HyperText Mark-up Language have taken an amazing step towards a universal reproduction of what we create: but we have to accept that with a communication system covering the whole, unstandardised, world, we can never predict exactly what a viewer will see.

The tale you told about an entire County Library Internet system turning off the images does indeed seem extraordinarily restrictive: at the same time it is clear that a web author has to recognise that any individual user, or group, can choose to turn images off in their browser, or even use an earlier browser which doesn't show images, or again they may have an 'economy' service which doesn't allow for the transfer of images - and there are valid reasons why they might choose that, like speed for instance. But, of course, even if you publish illustrations in a book, or include a booklet with a CD, you can never know how far any one user will exploit their value...

What seems like faulty pages might actually be inadequacies in the net connection and service...

The feeling that no-one properly understands some functions of a program may be familiar: but is that so extraordinary? Programs are quite sophisticated, and even experienced users may not have plumbed all the depths of one - it's a bit like saying 'We put a dictionary in the office six months ago, and there are still some words no-one has learnt'...

It may seen like sacrilege, but I am afraid we are in for a very frustrating time if we're expecting anyone writing on the World-Wide Web, to use traditional UK standards of English - or even to place a high value on them. Whatever we might wish, I think it's a fact of computer life, that 99% of the language use comes from America, from technologists whose concerns are with getting very complicated things working before the competition gets in first, from people who were toddlers in the days when 'Standard English' really was the standard.

Finding the right word to describe a function accurately is surely the aim of the writers of lots of manuals, but the world is not perfect: and sometimes a program-producer economises in their documentation to keep prices affordable.

Of course it's upsetting if you've made some careful font selections, and they don't show up in the final result: but there are no fonts which work universally on all computers, and although you can indicate preferences - and Microsoft are offering a dozen fonts as a standard web package, so that everyone would have the same ones and you could specify those - yet there's no way of prescribing them in html - working with the web is a question of empowerment, rather than control... The font is a setting in each browser: there's a default suggestion (Times or Geneva 12 pt perhaps) but - whether by active choice or default - each Internet/WWW user chooses their own font and size. If you want specific fonts, you need to turn to a different kind of program, like Adobe Acrobat, which embeds them and can be loaded into a web-browser's window, or even a multimedia program like Flash, Live Motion, or MovieWorks.

Many of us may feel that a particular manual or help file needs rewriting: but who is supposed to do it?! In the worst case I came across, I ended up doing it myself!

I wonder if your frustration might be less if you could get hold of a basic chapter on how the web works? I loved Apple's introduction, otherwise you might perhaps start with Thomas Reed's Pixel Pen web publishing guide.

You can do wonders with universal communication in html, but all the functions you have in a word processor will only work specifically for its own documents: for the www and in html I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few years for a more sophisticated version... at the moment a certain simplicity is the price we have to pay for universal access.

It sounds a bit as if you're using the program as a necessary tool - and when I think of the original Saxon meaning of 'work', as pain, I might even say 'a necessary evil'... but I wonder if instead you might find using it more satisfying if you could give a bit of time to playing with it: clicking on things to see what they do, asking it what it's good at, noticing how it did it, and using that later when you find a need for it: starting off with specific demands and insisting that it jump through your predetermined hoops will more often lead to frustration...

Hoping this may bring a little light into the tunnel...

With best wishes,

Guest Professor
Tartu University Department of Arts