Matt,
The quotation from Drucker in your contribution to Eloquent Images places the word "word" in scare quotes and these are subsequently dropped in your discussion. As has been recently mentioned on the Humanist discussion list "word" in computing has a technical meaning. Could Drucker have been signalled that meaning?
I find it very revealing that "word" has been conflated with "text" by one of the reviewers. There is a slight shift in vocabulary towards the end of the piece which might give rise to such conflation. It equally might give rise to a better understanding, an eloquent seeing, that in the discursive space you create, the discussions of word and image intersect with the text-graphic data types. One can create a text image (witness instances of ASCII art) just as one can create a graphic word.
I think the discussion of VRML suggests a progression at work in the essay:
bit, pixel, [scene in VRML; frame in animation (MacroMedia Flash, Animated GIF, Shockwave, etc)]. It seems that in some fashion there is a lucid dream at work in the writing. It is a dream of parsing. A dream that unites the realms of production and reception, that plays with the fluid identities to which Drucker points. In the field of resistence and rapture that the electronic form of word, image, text, graphic engender, parsable pixels exist and are manipulable. But as in the classic dreamwork of Freudian psychoanalysis, the parsable pixel is neither a word nor an image yet it is inherently textual. The parsable pixel functions almost like computing's unconscious. Almost like a hint of irreducible materiality as the other face of textuality.
Almost at most.

Francois, I'm pretty certain there was no specialized usage intended. As for the rest of your comments, would that the reviewer had read so thoughtfully.