Micromedia
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‘Micromedia’ is a term for characterizing, analyzing and understanding recent developments both in the "Mobile Web" and in the so-called "Web 2.0". It has recently been introduced by "postmodernist" media theorists in connection with networked digital media devices handling digital microcontent.
Two concepts of "micromedia" have been introduced independently from each other to describe digital media environments:
- Lev Manovich (www.manovich.net) in a paper called "Beyond Broadband: Macro-media and Micro-media" (2000).
- Umair Haque (www.bubblegeneration.com]), a specialist for the digital media economy emerging with "Web 2.0" services and practices, in a comprehensive Powerpoint-presentation titled "The New Economics od Media. Micromedia, Connected Consumption, and the Snowball Effect" (2005).
At present there is not a single and consistent definition in digital media theory, though such a definition seems to be possible and even a logical consequence.
Manovich is setting up an opposition between "macro-media" (broadband, multisensual) and "micro-media" ("minimalist media", the latest instance being mobile phones with tiny screens).
Haque is starting from a different observation: the "unbundling" of the macro-structures of traditional mass media content in a Web 2.0 context which is changing the nature of media and the media economy themselves. While digital items like e.g. news, audio files, pictures, and even theoretical arguments in scientific discourse, have earlier been only consumable as part of larger (and usually more expensive) units, this is changing with new technologies, practices, cultures and increasingly business models based on microcontent (also a term that has been introduced only recently).
