Elaine Toms on Information Genre

26Jun08

Looking over Toms’ article – admittedly written in 2001, when things looked a lot different – I’m underwhelmed. Toms nicely demonstrates that people parse documents in terms both of form and content, and that form is processed more quickly than is content. Given the speed with which people parse webpages, this is important. But Toms’ idea of what constitutes ‘genre’ seems curiously old-fashioned: she seems to be thinking predominantly in terms of layout and typography. This utterly fails to take into account,

the interactive nature of the web. Could it perhaps be argued that ‘genre’ on the web consists primarily of what a visitor can do on a site (in a button-pushing, strictly interactive sense), rather than what the site looks like? When I think of digital genres, I think not so much of “news sites” vs. “entertainment sites”, say, but in terms of wikis vs. e-commerce vs. blogs. The question of layout and typography might be more important in terms of alerting visitors to what is expected of them interactively rather than denoting what kind of information is found where on a page.
the temporal nature of media generally. Toms appears to be thinking of the business letter of one or two pages as the archetypal document. But most documents are longer (or take more memory, to put it another way), and so are ‘navigated’ temporally as well as spatially: one doesn’t read a book or make a purchase on Amazon all on one page, and tools have to exist to guide and orient the user of either through the experience.