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 concreteconvergence of access channels and connected services, and you end up with justeverything: Every media user having access to everything on every device, every mediacompany selling every type of media product, every kind of media content orcommunication service getting delivered through every platform or channel. And‘convergence’ can relate to access channels to the home (

triple play

), technical protocolsof transmission (

over IP

), economic channels (one provider for all services), culturallyencoded ‘contents’, associated social practices, mental and cognitive structures …One reason lies in the nature of media. Every kind of convergence imaginable is a mediaphenomenon, 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 signcirculation. They have their own inner logics and dynamics, in three dimensions:



technological dimension

(the physical constraints, the technical tools, thetechnical ‘protocols’, the degree of professionality needed),



semantic dimension

(the sign system used, with the associated cultural codes or‘protocols’



a twofold

systemic social dimension

: the functional apparatus (including ‘protocols’of production), and the emergent social network connecting the participants andusers (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 andecologies which always include other media – electric, digital, print. These constellationshave their own technical, cultural and social dimension, and they are quite differenthistorically and geo-culturally: They are not the same today in the USA or in Japan, or inGermany in the 1970s and in the 1990s.In the system that each specific instance of the media resembles, every profoundchange of one element does also have a profound effect on the media constellation aroundit. 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, itseems like everything is happening at once.But if convergence is just one of synchronous tendencies in the complex evolution ofmedia systems, constellations, and ecologies – why and since when did it becomenecessary to speak of ‘Convergence’ with a capital C? Short answer: Because the borders ofa supposed ‘natural order of the media’, which supposedly had unfolded in the last 100years, have increasingly become porous.

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 associatedwith 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 environment

, although permanentlychanging, still seemed to develop towards a ‘natural’ structure. When TV took overaround 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 fallingin 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 andradio/audio. Finally, with TV/video and the transistor radio, electric media filled allpossible channels of the private environment. Since the 1960s, the computer was alreadythere, but for some decades a large gap divided ‘mediums for thinking’ from the ‘massmedia’ dealing with entertainment and news. This did not change even when themainframe computer (a.k.a. the ‘Electric Brain’) got replaced by the PersonalMicrocomputer as a magical writing machine.So until the 1980s, a ‘natural order’ seemed to define the interrelations betweentechnological constraints, perceptive channels, attention patterns, and cultural structures.“A one-to-one relationship used to exist between a medium and its use”.

There wasprivate and professional media; audio, visual, and audiovisual media; one-to-manybroadcasted media and one-to-one ‘private’ media; static and moving pictures; soundrecorded and sound transmitted ‘live’. Further change was believed to be merely relatedto 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-longdevelopment looked like a ‘natural’ process aiming to fill all parts of the humanenvironment. Actually it was the other way round. Electric media created an emergingcultural field, shaping new human identities, consciousness, sensibilities, and even physicalexperiences. Marshall McLuhan recognized this, but he still saw no clear differencebetween a mere bundle of mediums of communication, resembling quasi-natural“extensions of man”, and the completely new “total and immersive field of electricmedia” he discovered and described.

Indeed, between ca. 1950 and 1990, we lived in the McLuhan Galaxy. But at the sametime, there was a tension growing between the expanding universe of multipletechnologies and channels, and the hidden emergence of a unified media culture, with‘pop culture’ as a forerunner for experimenting with new practices and experiences. Theterm ‘convergence’ came up at the historical point, when technologies seemed to startconverging too, creating the irritating possibility of many-to-many relationships between amedium and its ‘content’.Still there were two independent sources of irritation. On the surface, it was all abouttechnology. ‘New media’ came up, which still were understood as

mediums

, digitaltechnologies for encoding and transmitting. At first, this didn’t have much of a directeffect on the everyday life of the typical media consumer. But at the same time

the use

ofold electric media had dramatically changed too. With remote controls and multi-channel24-hour-TV, Xerox photocopies, audio- and videotaping, McLuhanism had become aneveryday 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

in1984, he just combined in a highly suggestive way this set of revolutionary developments:new digital media, an immersive “mediasphere”

augmenting ‘first life’, media consumersbecoming competent media users and then media beings. Meanwhile, much nearer to the

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

Ithiel de Sola Pool,

Technologies of Freedom

, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1983, p. 23.

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 thedownfall of IBM’s ‘Big Brother’ office computing paradigm. At the same time, thoughlargely unnoticed, the cellphone was introduced to the mainstream market. So the parts ofa 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 ofdelivery” 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 asthe post, telephone, and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio,and television.”

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 themedia industry, connecting and bundling TV, cinema, pop-radio, records, print media.The high time of convergence talk came in 1995, because digital

multimedia

seemed toprovide a ‘natural’ technological platform for merging the technological and theeconomical vision. Cross-media strategies were in full bloom. “Life after television” meantthat, sooner or later, all media content would flow into the living room through a singleblack box, a synthesis of the PC, the TV set, and the Hi-fi. The Internet/Web was only seenas a powerful medium for transport and paying: a digital multimedia superhighway. Thesewere the years when Bill Gates built his futuristic fully-digital hi-tech home. It becameoutdated very soon.In fact, convergence again became a puzzling and complex thing. The game station grewinto a strong competitor for the strategic position of the unified media box. The idea ofpulling/pushing personalized ‘content’ collapsed with the Dotcom Bubble. The Web provedto be much more than a combination of superhighway and archive – it turned out to be amediasphere, a life-world of its own. And the mobile phone too developed into much morethan 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 beenbrilliantly summarized by Henry Jenkins in his book

Convergence Culture

: “If the digitalrevolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emergingconvergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in even more complexways.”

But in which ways, we have only barely begun to understand.

John Hartley,

Uses of Television

, Routledge: London, New York 1999, pp. 217f. For Hartley, the

mediasphere

isthe “universe of all media”, across all platforms, genres and content types, and part of what Jurij M. Lotmancalled “semiosphere”. This

mediasphere

is not the same as Régis Debrays’

mediosphère

, which is still sort of ananthropological super-structure in the tradition of Harold Innis or Teilhard de Chardin.

De Sola Pool,

op.cit