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The word ‘content’ suggests that a document is a container... I’ve never liked that metaphor
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The word ‘content’ suggests that a document is a container... I’ve never liked that metaphor
‘Her words carry little meaning’, ‘Try to pack more thought into fewer words’, ‘It’s hard to get that idea across to him’. Michael Reddy1 quotes these expressions as evidence of what he calls the ‘conduit metaphor’, whereby we think of language and media as containing meanings.
Because it’s so embedded in language, the conduit metaphor easily leads to the idea that communication is a matter of transporting content from the page into the reader’s head. And therefore that success can measured by examining whether people can recall what they’ve read. For example, the cognitive psychologist Bonnie Meyer2 explains that, according to her model of text comprehension,
‘readers are assumed to construct memory representations of text propositions which are similar in terms of both hierarchical relationships and content to the content structure of the writer.’
This a necessary assumption underlying much of education – we can’t imagine doctors, engineers or lawyers not learning facts about their fields.
But it’s not the only purpose of communication. So when we read research on information design, it’s worth thinking about the assumptions the researchers are making about what constitutes success, and therefore what to measure.
Taken too far, the idea that texts are containers can lead to a loss of focus on the users. Tom Sticht3 attributes the failure of technical manuals to communicate effectively to an excessive degree of topic-orientation. The technical writers he surveyed saw their task as simply one of assembling and recording all that is known about their topic, rather than express in a way that helps users complete tasks.
1. Reddy MJ (1979) ‘The conduit metaphor – a case of frame conflict in our language about language’, in A Ortony (ed), Metaphor and thought, Cambridge University Press
2. Meyer BJF (1985) ‘Prose analysis: purposes, procedures, and problems’, in BK Britton & JB Black (eds), Understanding expository text, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 11–64
3. Sticht T (1985) ‘Understanding readers and their uses of text’, in TM Duffy & RHW Waller (eds), Designing usable texts, Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, 315–340