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.

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.
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
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.
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.

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.
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

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.
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

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
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
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.
 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.

25
Ibid.