ABSTRACT
We can begin with the blue field that is eclipsed when the computer successfully boots up. It is not, as I will try to show, a screen, a window, or a portal but the ground for any display of information whatsoever. Blue is the field that palpitates between the appearance of simulated life, after booting up, and the void of information absence, negation, or implosion. Nearly all the drive characteristics, addresses, and memory of the computer are activated by the system configuration that grounds itself on this blue field. Even its acronym, BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), provokes anxiety in its community of users and its actual appearance is met with convulsions and despair. This blue field is the most feared colour in the Microsoft world, occurring whenever something has gone terribly wrong, when the system encounters a fatal error, or when the system fails absolutely.
Happily, my topic is not catastrophe, but the colour blue of the homepage of Microsoft Internet Explorer, MSN, and the Microsoft Nation. The homepage is in fact the face and indeed the flag of that nation and the foundation on which Microsoft asserts its distinctive claims to sovereignty. Like the pyramids, its construction and maintenance required billions of dollars and years of effort by thousands of people. But unlike the pyramids, the details of its monumentality change daily. Though we are obliged to acknowledge the distinctive claims to local sovereignty evident in design and language of the page in China, Norway, the UK, or France, MSN is the homepage of dozens of discrete electronic states and constitutes, in its full assemblage, a veritable and virtual United Nations. For millions of users the day starts and ends in the space of its embrace. This is simply to say that the look and design of MSN’s homepage is at the same time a complex icon of national identity and a kind of supernational, multicultural grammar of significant informational form. For these reasons, I propose to study the design, significance, and function of this single page. Necessarily, I will restrict myself to an analysis of a single instance; for convenience, the American one. I propose then, at the outset, a simple formal analysis of the page with just a few elements: shape, dimension, colour, and layout. We can move from there to the larger, less obvious schemes.
For the Pythagoreans, remember, beauty inhered in proportions, in ratios. Though the heritage of the concept is complex, the classical golden ratio, height to width, is 1 to 1.62 (roughly 3 to 5). The extent to which Renaissance scholars and artists employed this ratio in painting, architecture, and book design is a subject of continuing debate. It may not be clear, however, that the designers of home computers, both desktops and laptops, had this ratio in mind when framing their world. What we actually see as the dimensions of the typical computer screen, height to width, until it recently went widescreen, was 1:1.33 (3 to 4). History shows that this is, in fact, the precise ratio of the 35mm silent-film image, later formally adopted as the official, classical Hollywood standard and the same proportion, until recently, of the standard US television screen. Indeed, this ratio is nearly identical to that of a sheet of standard American business stationery. This modern ratio, to which the proportions of the computer screen conform, constitutes, in effect, a definite formal paradigm which, for lack of a better term, we might designate as the ‘Corporate Ratio’, the CR for short. Let’s then designate this new 3 to 4 ratio as the enshrined ratio of Western, commercial, and representational civilization in the twentieth century.
The ratio of the Microsoft Network homepage, however, is different from that of the frame of the computer screen, both because of some margins and bars and because the page extends into an area below the frame-line of the computer screen. The display presented by the computer screen is that of a landscape format. The full homepage cannot be seen in its entirety in a single glance. To view the full homepage, the user must scroll down to see what, adopting a term from old media, is ‘below the fold’ – about 60 per cent of the page. The page, as distinguished from the screen, is modelled on the portrait – the vertical dimension is dominant. However, if the homepage were rotated on its side, 90 degrees, and seen in a fully unscrolled manner, the ratio of the full, extended homepage would conform, almost exactly, to the 1 to 1.62 ratio of the Greek ideal. What area does this screen frame? On a standard laptop, the MSN homepage is about 27cm X 40cm; that is about 11in. x 18in. The surface that supports MSN information is about 1,100 square centimetres, about one and a third square feet. A page of a newspaper, edge to edge, for example The New York Times, is 12in. X 22in. and contains about 20 per cent more information area than the homepage.
To sum up, the frame of the computer screen has the same ratio as the image of the classic Hollywood cinema, the television screen, and the standard sheet of writing paper. The ratio of the unscrolled homepage, laid on its side, is nearly identical to the ratio of the Pythagorean golden rectangle. The computer screen and the MSN homepage, in other words, constitute two different paradigms for the presentation or display of information – one modern and one ancient. But, we must ask, is this duplex format beautiful?
The layout of the homepage page consists of three vertical columns capped top and bottom by three horizontal bars. The centre and right columns are of the same width; the left column is about half the width of the other two. Inside these columns (in mid-2009) were 19 rectangles, the building blocks of the page. With their headings, we might call these units, for lack of a more precise term, ‘chapters’. They are irregular, both in size and alignment (with respect to chapters in adjacent columns). The centre and right columns appear on a flat white surface and are separated by a thin blue line that delineates a border. The white columns in turn are superimposed on a blue background that decreases in saturation from top to bottom of the page. The topics are standard: ‘news’, ‘sports’, ‘money’, ‘entertainment’, ‘health’, and ‘shopping’, as well as ‘today’s picks’, ‘msn and you’, ‘A list searches’, advertisements, and so on.
What we have called the chapters consist of two basic geometrical figures – rectangles, about twice as long as they are high, and squares. There is considerable uniformity. Each has a printed heading in bold typeface and four or five one-line, bulleted, story items. Three quarters of the chapters incorporate a photograph, in every case located in its own enclosure in the upper left of the chapter frame. Most chapters have a pair of buttons on the upper right that permit expansion or contraction of the listed items. Several chapters incorporate smaller boxes with a green ‘go’ button allowing the user to ‘find’ or ‘get’ additional information on the referenced topic. The left column incorporates some specific MSN operations – Hotmail accounts, tools for customizing content, and, notably, the option, with a screen and controls, to select and play from a catalogue of videos. The left column, unlike the other two, is set on a blue background. Two top horizontal panels, one blue, one white, extend continuously across the page with six clusters of topics organized alphabetically, from ‘Air Tickets’ to ‘Yellow Pages’. The bottom panel has a similar design, with segregation of options by headings – ‘features’, ‘go to’, and ‘services’. Both the top and bottom horizontal panels present an open search box.
The overall look of the homepage is of a loose, even casual amalgam of irregularly sized boxed, bordered units irregularly aligned in columns, consisting of combinations of text and image, whose dominant colour scheme varies from blue on white to white on blue. The colour blue, the ultimate support, is modulated for contrast and emphasis. Even the photographs are figured according to this regime. The typeface and size, whether in blue or white, is nearly uniform. There are small touches of black, green, and red. The font style, a Microsoft-commissioned typeface, Verdana 8.5, is designed to be readable in the graphic environment characteristic of standard computer screens.
The MSN homepage is the congenial face, the façade of Microsoft Internet Explorer. The design of the search engine is hidden in complex, invisible algorithms. The purpose of Internet Explorer, the browser, is to control and to monopolize the user’s access to the world available on the internet. The homepage assists by mapping the world in familiar, useraccepted categories. The central business strategy of integrating the browser with the operating system enforced the restrictions on interoperability, annihilated competitors, and positioned Internet Explorer as the dominant browser, in control of nearly 80 per cent (prior to the ascendency of Google) of the world’s searches.
Microsoft’s replacement of the original MS_DOS text-based interface by the Xerox–Apple ‘graphical user interface’ in the late 1980s constituted the radically new paradigm of the user–computer interface for the general population. The point-and-click hypertext system, with its convenient windows, menus, and icons, established the current paradigm by enhancing the sense of user power and control while reducing user effort. The audible click is perhaps the most gratifying sound in this new universe of work. Every picture and line of text, regardless of specific content, is integrated as a hook into the substratum of a wider, denser, deeper, more declarative, commercial network. The homepage itself, however, disguises this purpose and presents just two chapters, less than 10 per cent of the page area, designated as ‘advertisement’. However, each bulleted story, whether news, service, or lifestyle, constitutes points of attachment that lead the user to related commercial services. The segregated, horizontal panels at the top and bottom of the page are plainly lifestyle directories, sites for social comparison, celebrity, self-refashioning and gratification. A story on uncharted islands, accompanied with pictures, for example, promised escape to deserted beaches in French Polynesia, but led directly to the frequently consulted MSN Travel section and to a page crowded with ads and sponsored links for flights, hotels, and cars. An unsolicited offer to help the user find related articles leads to new pages and new links. These new pages, in turn, have three columns – the left is the directory, the middle the article proper, the right a full vertical column of associated ads. Overdetermination of the routes to consumption, that is enforced territorialization of uninhabited space through an itinerary of established links/routes to other Microsoft-owned or affiliated sites; that is, self-reference is, where possible, the preferred model of commercial occupation. Indeed, it is the model for the entire network and, in this branching, networked, recursive way, the Microsoft universe is integrated, evolves, and is held together.
Whatever the apparently casual appearance of the homepage, its most striking and fundamental functional feature is this – every chapter, picture, line, and word is integrated into an architecture built on a graphical interface activated by a mouse and nearly every mark on the page is a hypertext link to another site. A click on ‘weather’ leads to an ad for automobile insurance performed by a break-dancing skeleton. The homepage is keyed to the restricted array of hypertext links. Indeed, user-initiated search is only possible by activation of an archaic, mechanical apparatus, the typewriter keyboard. This organized, preselected set of topical categories, their stories, and the skeins of affiliation and entailment constitute a veritable map of the world according to Microsoft. Its chapters and boxed panels are its continents. Every site in this universe, whatever its self-presentation, is sold, bought, and sponsored. Within this paradigm, information is organized, packaged, and displayed. In this respect, the MSN homepage is a corporate representation of the larger commercial world that Microsoft integrates. The page reflects the face and the psyche of the public as a more or less integrated array of social subjects – that is, as a nation. ‘Network’ and ‘national’ thus become substitutable terms. In this way, the public sphere as a universe of discourse is reduced to a union of potential consumers, a market, a universe of networked consumption.
American commercial television as a temporal, linear medium required obligatory viewing of ads as the price for the privilege of moving towards and viewing the next segment of the story. In television logic, the network sells consumers to advertisers and the circuit is completed only after a temporal delay when the product is purchased at the supermarket. Like television, the stories and pictures on the MSN homepage are simply points of attraction or adhesion between two domains: the public and the world of commerce. However, with the internet, the opportunities for commercial linkage are exponentially expanded and patterns of consumption, and of reading, are fundamentally altered. With e-marketing, the temporal distance between the ad and the execution of the purchase is the time needed to click the mouse. The MSN homepage brings together newspaper columns, stories, and format with television’s means of attracting audience attention in a uniquely direct, effective, innovative commercial medium. In this sense, the point-and-click system represents a simple but profound elaboration on the mediated system that contracts the space between desire/need and its material attainment that commercial television successfully introduced and exploited. Cross-media, synergistic platforms intensify this commercial network at nodal points of attraction.
For these reasons, the area framed by the MSN homepage, though small, is some of the most valuable real estate on the face of the planet. It is, moreover, not a stand-alone entity. It is legally and institutionally allied as a business and a presentational form with a cable television channel, MSNBC, and indirectly with CNBC, the Consumer News and Business Channel, promoted as ‘America’s Business Channel’. This channel is structured to include significant content participation with the Dow Jones Corporation and The Wall Street Journal. These financial institutions interpenetrate, support, and feature each other in the construction of the American financial landscape. CNBC, the cable channel, is notable for its innovative stylization of visual format, with active, horizontal bars at the top and bottom of the TV screen. Throughout its various format transformations – of set, logos, graphics, and printed texts – the show has been dominated by the colour blue, a deep blue. Blue, of course, in today’s action and thriller movie genres, is the new noir. It’s the colour of the elevator shafts, wiring, and the secret and often dangerous restricted spaces of computer and communications centres, the offices of the police and CIA, warehouses, and headquarters of multinational banks. In the movies it’s the colour of the rarely seen insides of modern, tall commercial buildings in New York, Los Angeles, and European capitals. It is a colour that carries a narrative and emotional edge. It is serious and dangerous. It is the colour of international intrigue and the world of high finance. Word, Windows, and Internet Explorer make blue the sign and banner of the Microsoft universe as well. I think it is no secret – blue is the colour of money. We might even say blue is the colour of our era.
