Understanding Micromedia Convergence

Martin Lindner

Understanding Micromedia Convergence.
How Microcontent Is Creating a New Media Space Between the Phones.

Media Convergence

Thinking about ‘convergence’ makes you feel dizzy. You start with the concrete convergence of access channels and connected services, and you end up with just everything: Every media user having access to everything on every device, every media company selling every type of media product, every kind of media content or communication service getting delivered through every platform or channel. And ‘convergence’ can relate to access channels to the home (triple play), technical protocols of transmission (over IP), economic channels (one provider for all services), culturally encoded ‘contents’, associated social practices, mental and cognitive structures …

One reason lies in the nature of media. Every kind of convergence imaginable is a media phenomenon, and media is a mass noun not to be mistaken for the plural of mediums. Media are more than transmission technologies. They are complex systems of sign circulation. They have their own inner logics and dynamics, in three dimensions:

• a technological dimension (the physical constraints, the technical tools, the technical ‘protocols’, the degree of professionality needed),
  
  

• a semantic dimension (the sign system used, with the associated cultural codes or ‘protocols’¹),
  
  

• a twofold systemic social dimension: the functional apparatus (including ‘protocols’ of production), and the emergent social network connecting the participants and users (including ‘protocols’ of usage).

Single instances of ‘the media’ are mostly identified with the main device: e.g. TV, PC, mobile phone, the press. This is false. In fact they are parts of media constellations and ecologies which always include other media – electric, digital, print. These constellations have their own technical, cultural and social dimension, and they are quite different historically and geo-culturally: They are not the same today in the USA or in Japan, or in Germany in the 1970s and in the 1990s.

In the system that each specific instance of the media resembles, every profound change of one element does also have a profound effect on the media constellation around it. This may sometimes lead to convergence of media, but often to divergence as well (diversification of technologies, of markets, of contents, of user attention). Right now, it seems like everything is happening at once.

But if convergence is just one of synchronous tendencies in the complex evolution of media systems, constellations, and ecologies – why and since when did it become necessary to speak of ‘Convergence’ with a capital C? Short answer: Because the borders of a supposed ‘natural order of the media’, which supposedly had unfolded in the last 100 years, have increasingly become porous.

A Very Short History of “Convergence”

In the first hundred years the electric media environment², although permanently changing, still seemed to develop towards a ‘natural’ structure. When TV took over around 1950, and bundled functions and characteristics of radio, movies, and the press, nobody did speak of ‘convergence”. It just appeared like the last piece of a puzzle falling in place.

The history of electric media had started with the constellation of telegraphy, photography and mass print around 1870. It was expanded by telephony, cinema and radio/audio. Finally, with TV/video and the transistor radio, electric media filled all possible channels of the private environment. Since the 1960s, the computer was already there, but for some decades a large gap divided ‘mediums for thinking’ from the ‘mass media’ dealing with entertainment and news. This did not change even when the mainframe computer (a.k.a. the ‘Electric Brain’) got replaced by the Personal Microcomputer as a magical writing machine.

So until the 1980s, a ‘natural order’ seemed to define the interrelations between technological constraints, perceptive channels, attention patterns, and cultural structures. “A one-to-one relationship used to exist between a medium and its use”.³ There was private and professional media; audio, visual, and audiovisual media; one-to-many broadcasted media and one-to-one ‘private’ media; static and moving pictures; sound recorded and sound transmitted ‘live’. Further change was believed to be merely related to technological sophistication: remote control, cable TV, video, high resolution screens, digital storing and transmission, but also new electronic printing processes.

True, there were conflicts and paradigm changes, but all in all a hundred-year-long development looked like a ‘natural’ process aiming to fill all parts of the human environment. Actually it was the other way round. Electric media created an emerging cultural field, shaping new human identities, consciousness, sensibilities, and even physical experiences. Marshall McLuhan recognized this, but he still saw no clear difference between a mere bundle of mediums of communication, resembling quasi-natural “extensions of man”, and the completely new “total and immersive field of electric media” he discovered and described.⁴

Indeed, between ca. 1950 and 1990, we lived in the McLuhan Galaxy. But at the same time, there was a tension growing between the expanding universe of multiple technologies and channels, and the hidden emergence of a unified media culture, with ‘pop culture’ as a forerunner for experimenting with new practices and experiences. The term ‘convergence’ came up at the historical point, when technologies seemed to start converging too, creating the irritating possibility of many-to-many relationships between a medium and its ‘content’.

Still there were two independent sources of irritation. On the surface, it was all about technology. ‘New media’ came up, which still were understood as mediums, digital technologies for encoding and transmitting. At first, this didn’t have much of a direct effect on the everyday life of the typical media consumer. But at the same time the use of old electric media had dramatically changed too. With remote controls and multi-channel 24-hour-TV, Xerox photocopies, audio- and videotaping, McLuhanism had become an everyday practice. ‘Mass media’ had finally turned into ubiquitous and omnipresent media: ‘ubi-media’. And in the following two decades, it became digital.

When underground SF-writer William Gibson introduced the notion of cyberspace in 1984, he just combined in a highly suggestive way this set of revolutionary developments: new digital media, an immersive “mediasphere” ⁵ augmenting ‘first life’, media consumers becoming competent media users and then media beings. Meanwhile, much nearer to the mainstream, the Macintosh 1984 TV ad proclaimed the dawn of a ‘digital lifestyle’ and the downfall of IBM’s ‘Big Brother’ office computing paradigm. At the same time, though largely unnoticed, the cellphone was introduced to the mainstream market. So the parts of a new media constellation were there, and “convergence” was its label.

The following decades struggled to understand the inner logic of this constellation. There were two mainly independent concepts. On one side, the “convergence of modes of delivery” was leading to the erosion of the quasi-natural order of the old mediasphere, “blurring the lines between media, even between point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone, and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio, and television.”⁶ On the other side, “Content is King” was the word of the day. Disney, Vivendi, Sony, Murdoch et al. were trying to build cross-platform value-chains all over the media industry, connecting and bundling TV, cinema, pop-radio, records, print media.

The high time of convergence talk came in 1995, because digital multimedia seemed to provide a ‘natural’ technological platform for merging the technological and the economical vision. Cross-media strategies were in full bloom. “Life after television” meant that, sooner or later, all media content would flow into the living room through a single black box, a synthesis of the PC, the TV set, and the Hi-fi. The Internet/Web was only seen as a powerful medium for transport and paying: a digital multimedia superhighway. These were the years when Bill Gates built his futuristic fully-digital hi-tech home. It became outdated very soon.

In fact, convergence again became a puzzling and complex thing. The game station grew into a strong competitor for the strategic position of the unified media box. The idea of pulling/pushing personalized ‘content’ collapsed with the Dotcom Bubble. The Web proved to be much more than a combination of superhighway and archive – it turned out to be a mediasphere, a life-world of its own. And the mobile phone too developed into much more than just another complementary medium for transmitting and marketing the same old media content (news, celebrities, weather, sports, and porn).

So around 2003, a third wave of convergence discourse began. Just now it has been brilliantly summarized by Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture: “If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in even more complex ways.”⁷ But in which ways, we have only barely begun to understand.

The Place Between the Phones

“Cyberspace” is the “place between the phones”.⁸ The slogan is from a time when modems still got fixed on phone receivers, and it was put literally in the film “Matrix”, but it can be re-used for our era. Between mobile phones (and other mobile networked devices) a new kind of media space is emerging. It is not a means for communication, but a place to live.

This was the epiphany Howard Rheingold experienced in 2000, in the streets of Tokyo: When he saw hundreds of people at Shibuya Crossing, looking at their phones instead of talking into them, it blew his mind. And when he observed similar behaviour at the other end of the world, in Helsinki, he really became convinced that a fundamental change of the global media environment was happening. In his book Smart Mobs,⁹ the view of convergence is focused on new forms of technologically enabled social networks and collaboration. Although it starts with the Japanese i-mode, the very first successful realization of a Mobile Web environment, in this book mobile phones are just one form of ubiquitous computing and digital networks.

Jenkins, in contrast, sees the transformation of ‘the media’ as a new synthesis of movies, TV, and digital gaming. For him, the Web is more of an augmentation of audiovisual media – a digital jukebox and a meta-medium for reflecting and communicating media. The same goes for the mobile phone. For Jenkins, it is either just the smallest device to consume and produce audio/video, or a means of communication about other media usage.

A third perspective on convergence puts the Web in the center, as a media of its own, neither reducible to ‘interactive mass media’ nor to being just an interface to networked communication. Although not mentioning the mobile phone, in Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002) David Weinberger described a media space characterized by “voices” and “conversations”. ¹⁰

In the meantime, we have seen the boom of the Web 2.0 and the beginnings of the Mobile Web, and it seems to be clear that both will melt into a more unified for of media soon. Until now this did not happen. Indeed, the long-awaited mainstream adaptation of the Mobile Web still has yet to come. I-mode was an exception although we now have UMTS, web-enabled smartphones and the iPhone. There are technological, infrastructural, and commercial difficulties (see Jaokar/Fish 2006¹¹). But the cultural side of this is even more unclear. Neither enterprises nor users seem to know, how the new ‘media space between the phones’ should look and feel.

What would be possible cultural forms? Enthusiasts of the mobile phone tend to focus on the unique quality of ‘mobility’: the intimate experience of really of personal and physical ‘extension’, and the importance of the geographic position.¹² Paul Levinson’s Cellphone (2002)¹³ presents a radical McLuhanistic account of this concept, but poses severe questions: Does it really make sense to add ‘mobile intimate media’ as a new category besides ‘mass media’, ‘electric media’, and ‘digital media’? And is there really a direct line from the ballpoint pen, the Kodak camera, and the transistor radio? What is the complex relation between media and mediums? And what exactly does ‘mobility’ mean in the age of electric digital media?

The first modern media space was the metropolis: the augmentation of physical space with media (telegraphy, press, cinema), including telephony in public and professional spaces. The second media space was the suburban home. (The office is just another instance of such a walled ‘home’ space, with the Microsoft PC finally becoming its main media interface.)

In this constellation, the telephone was not yet really part of “the media”, like TV, magazines, and radio. It was more like the car and public transport, part of the commodities that defined the space. But, as McLuhan noted, there were already tendencies anticipating present practices and experiences. It is the teenager, he said, who “understands the telephone”, while “the Bell Telephone research department … are oblivious to the telephone as a form, and study only the content aspect”.¹⁴ Fixed-line telephony became used here in a swarm-like and immersive manner not reducible to exchanging ‘messages’ between ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’. These teenagers already lived in a ‘place between the phones’ (and radios, and jukeboxes), preparing the way for hackers and ‘Generation Txt’. Pop culture always showed a strong tendency toward media convergence.

So what now the new ‘place between the phones’? Is it really primarily a geo-space, just because people are travelling much more, both locally and globally. Even before mobile phones and the wireless Web, Marc Augé, a ethnologist, had argued that places tend to lose their characteristics in a globalized “supermodernist civilization”. Although (or even because) permanently changing position all the time, people stay in uniform non-places – cars/highways, public transport, shopping malls, hotels, and airports.¹⁵ In such an environment, the mythological killer application for the commercial Mobile Web doesn’t make that much sense: What’s the point in getting pointed to the next restaurant in a standardized coffee-to-go world? And doesn’t the fascination of mobile phones lie very much in the possibility ‘to beam oneself up’ into a non-space, a world made of signs, everywhere and nowhere at once?¹⁶

Mobile phones do not mark a return to primary, less alienated life forms: to orality, to the body, to geographic space, to a world of ‘real communication’. Again, a new media space is emerging, with its own characteristics and inner logic. Just like in Matrix, the real world of today already resembles an ubiquitous media space. The body and oral language are becoming ‘secondary’ themselves in a world where the air is filled with ubiquitous visions and ‘oral’ statements that, like only printed statements in earlier times, do not go away, lingering above the heads of the crowd like an omnipresent cloud. And it is also the other way round: With SMS and the Web 2.0, literacy is just now taking on characteristics of traditional orality.

So whatever the new media space will be like, it is located in between and beyond: between and beyond the old opposition of body/orality and literacy/mind, between and beyond geographical places, between and beyond ‘Web pages’, between and beyond the old oppositions of ‘reality’ vs. ‘media’ and ‘real world’ vs. virtual world’.

Micromedia

In 2000, Russian media theorist Lev Manovich noticed that people were fascinated by playing old games like Tetris on the mobile phone. So he came to postulate two diverging lines of media evolution: Macro-media and micromedia.¹⁷ We are, he said, used to expect media to develop “toward ‘more’ – more resolution, better color, better visual fidelity, more bandwidth, more immersion”. Media of that kind have macro-screens and deliver macro-content, calling for single-focused, long-term attention. But micromedia are, on the contrary, “characterized by low resolution, low fidelity, and slow speeds”. They are typically made for small screens. Or, in the case of the Web 2.0, they are “widgets” using only small fractions of a bigger screen. Either way, they request only semi-focused or peripheric¹⁸ attention.

In Manovich’s perspective, this is not just a less satisfactory early stage of “rich media”, but a remarkably stable cultural form of its own right that has just been moving “from platform to platform” – from early PCs to early game consoles, from the early Web to mobile phones. And these “minimalist media or micro-media”, he said, would “not only successfully compete with macro-media but may even overtake it in popularity”. It turned out that he was right.

The open, ubiquitous non-space created by micromedia is not just an alternative space like the futurist macromedia home still being presented at hi-tech trade shows. They have to be micro to transform the ‘real’ space into a whole new media space by adding multiple layers augmenting the world with objects designed for peripheric and casual attention. Before the internet-enabled cellphone, this kind of multitasking multimedia-experience had mainly been restricted to the home. Now, with the small “fourth screen” of the mobile phone acting as a “background device”,¹⁹ micromedia is been taken to the streets.

To use many devices and interfaces at the same time, media have to be casual, “seamful”, and “cool”.²⁰ This means that traditional media formats and contents will be fundamentally changed, and many macromedia-based business plans will be shattered.²¹ Content will have to become digital “microcontent”, “with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use […]”.²²

Anil Dash, a weblog visionary and businessman, gave the first definition of digital microcontent, when he discovered in 2002 “that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet.”²³ The double nature is crucial: Microcontent is both human and technological. It is the basic ‘unit of attention’ (“meme-sized”) in digital networked media, and it is a chunk of digital data formatted in a way that allows easy production, aggregation, annotation, and re-use.²⁴

We are now witnessing a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of mostly mobilized microcontent applications, including text/presence (e.g. Jaiku), pictures/graphics (e.g. Flickr), videos (e.g. YouTube), Web radio (e.g. Pandora, LastFM …), ‘geo-bookmarks’ (Socialight, Qype …), user-generated micro-video (Qik), micro-audio (Utterz) .... From this soup new cultural forms will crystallize. It is still very early, and predictions are difficult. But some points about micromedia convergence can be made:

• In the future, the mobile phone will become a main microcontent client for consuming, recording, producing, annotating, aggregating, publishing. It will be a main part in a foodchain.
  
  

• The micromedia space is based on circulation, not on communication, transmission, or consumption. It will neither be a 3D ‘virtual world’ nor the seamless space of the visionaries of “pervasive computing”. Written text will merge with voice and visual elements to create new cultural forms beyond the old notions of orality and literacy.
  
  

• Micromedia design will have to understand concepts like “lifestreams” (David Gelernter), “points of presence” (Kingsley Idehen, Martin Lindner), “personal and local info-clouds” (Thomas Vander Wal), “seamfulness” (Matthew Chalmers), and “user experience flows” for “Continuous Partial Attention” (Linda Stone).²⁵
  
  

Beyond outdated visions of techno-futurists, and fulfilling the old promise of electric media, the mobile phone will help to transform ‘real life’ through the open, dynamic, unpredictable, virus-like, and ubiquitous circulation of micromedia.

1 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins introduces the concept of “protocols“ taken from a forthcoming publication of Lisa Geitelman (pp. 289, 291). Although still being vague, the term covers all those practices which are so closely associated with one medium that they seem to be a ‘natural’ condition of its usage: technological, economic, legal, social, cultural.

2 I follow Marshall McLuhan in insisting of the unique quality of “electric media”, although he himself did blur this many times by calling nearly everything “media”, including cavemen engravings, cars, and electric light.

3 Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1983, p. 23.

4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964], Routledge: London, 2001.

5 John Hartley, Uses of Television, Routledge: London, New York 1999, pp. 217f. For Hartley, the mediasphere is the “universe of all media”, across all platforms, genres and content types, and part of what Jurij M. Lotman called “semiosphere”. This mediasphere is not the same as Régis Debrays’ mediosphère, which is still sort of an anthropological super-structure in the tradition of Harold Innis or Teilhard de Chardin.

6 De Sola Pool, op.cit., p. 23.

7 Jenkins, op.cit., p. 6.

8 Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown. Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam, 1993.

9 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, New York: Basic Books, 2002.

10 David Weinberger, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. A Unified Theory of the Web, Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002.

11 Ajit Jaokar, Tony Fish, Mobile Web 2.0, London: Futuretext, 2006.

12 e.g. Mark Aakhus, James Katz (eds.), Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk and Public Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

13 Paul Levinson, Cellphone: The story of the world’s most mobile medium and how it has transformed everything, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

14 McLuhan, op.cit., p. 292

15 Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London, New York: Verso, 1995.

16 New ‘locative’ Web 2.0 applications like Plazes, Dopplr, Jaiku, Socialight, Qype … do not simply mark a return of the mobile generation to ‘real places’, but even more the transformation of ‘real’ places into parts of the wider non-space of the digital mediasphere.

17 Lev Manovich, “Beyond Broadband: Macromedia and Micro-media”, in: Geert Lovink (ed.), net.congestion reader, Amsterdam: De Balie, 2000. Digital version at URL: http://www.manovich.net/docs/Mass.cro_micro.doc

18 Martin Lindner, “Human-centered Design for ‘Casual’ Information and Learning in Micromedia Environments”, in M3 - Interdisciplinary Aspects on Digital Media & Education. Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium of the WG HCI&UE of the Austrian Computer Society (ACS) 2006, ed. by. Andreas Holzinger et al., pp. 52 – 60. I owe the notion of “peripheric design” to John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, “Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design”, Human-Computer Interaction, v 9 (1994), n 1, pp. 3-36. URL: http://www.johnseelybrown.com/Borderline_Issues.pdf

19 Charlie Schick, “What are the true qualities of mobility?” (2005), Entry in Weblog Lifeblog. URL: http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog/2005/09/what_are_the_tr.html

20 See Lindner, op.cit., for a closer look at the concepts of casual and cool media, and the notion of “seamfulness” (Matthew Chalmers).

21 Umair Haque, “The New Economics of Media. Micromedia, Connected Consumption, and the Snowball Effect” (2005). This is a Powerpoint-essay published at Haque’s weblog bubblegeneration, URL: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/mediaeconomics.ppt

22 Anil Dash, “Introducing the Microcontent Client” (2002). URL: http://www.anildash.com/magazine/2002/11/introducing_the.html

23 Dash, op.cit.

24 Lindner, op.cit.

25 Ibid.