What’s in a Word? Microcontent and its discontents

Evocative, with just a whiff of zeitgeist, “microcontent” would seem to be a word whose time has come. Wikipedia states that the term was “systematically introduced and defined” in 2002 by Anil Dash as content “formatted for presentation” in small contexts, whether email clients, Web browsers or handheld devices. However, the word was coined at least four years earlier when Web design theorist Jakob Nielsen described microcontent more in terms of its extreme brevity and its descriptive and attention-grabbing purposes – headlines, subject tags and links of just forty to sixty characters, “pearls of clarity” intended to describe fuller content, i.e. “to explain your macrocontent” (1998).

Without explicitly defining the word, Bryan Alexander uses “microcontent” liberally in his essay “Web 2.0: a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?” (2006). In so doing, he suggests vastly wider and more insidious implications for the term. At first mention, Alexander (right) italicizes the word (either for emphasis or to underscore its foreignness) and equates microcontent with the “content chunks” that populate the social Web and set Web 2.0 apart from “the Web as book”. In other words, microcontent defines the Social Web. These discreet chunklets – brief text, a single photograph, etc. – can be shared, shuffled, merged and aggregated.

Microcontent, then, isn’t merely brief. It is content divorced from any container, whether “book” or webpage. Alexander apparently rejects Dash’s notion that microcontent is “formatted” at all. Users “personalize their bit of del.icio.us…with a minimally designed page” (Alexander, 2006). Textual microcontent possesses no visual form of its own – no layout, no font; it is amorphous, meant for extrusion and moulding. Alexander implies as much when he asks, “when will enough readers peruse Web sites through RSS and other microcontent readers to warrant resigning campus public electronic presentations?” (2006). He seems to suggest that “presentation” is strictly client-side – determined by the bland mould of the RSS reader or email client – and that this stands to render the static page (including its design and presentation) irrelevant, at which point publishers of information can abandon (or as he puts it, “resign”) these efforts altogether.

This is a giant leap and stands to cut an entire layer of expression and communication out of the picture – the “formal” layer of layout, typography, the synergy of text + image. These visual attributes are, of course, a legacy of print; Web 1.0 had been evolving into a collection of opulent magazines (and many poorly designed ones). The Web 2.0 paradigm of microcontent on-the-fly gives rise to sameness and efficiency via a limited number of generic, monotonous templates (for example, the one enclosing this very blog posting). The publisher loses control over aesthetic and communicative complexity and individuality.

Alexander rightly notes that “users have generated this material for decades” (2006). Indeed, content in general has been scaling down, as evident, for example, in news, where the public’s appetite for television-news brevity gave rise to USA Today’s shorter, informal style and likewise a greater quotient of “bites” in magazines and newspapers generally. However, microcontent’s mobility goes a stage further in redefining mass media. One needn’t “go to” the NewYorkTimes.com when one can set up feeds that excise portions of that newspaper from the whole and pull those chunks to one’s desktop. Thus whereas the Times’ website emulates the print newspaper’s ability to organize content visually, with size (e.g. headline) and placement (e.g. top of page, front of newspaper), the feed eliminates that organization entirely – and the majority of content along with it. The reader no longer scans the “world today” as determined by professionals working for corporations; rather, he pre-selects his subject areas, allows algorithms to cherry-pick his content from various sources, and largely tunes out. As we scan Bloglines instead of individual newspapers, our worldview becomes increasingly specialized and blinkered.

Meantime, for those who still visit newspapers, the Times increasingly features “blog” articles, distinguishable from news or traditional commentary less by their brevity than their chatty informality, up-to-the-second breathlessness, and openness to user comments. Thus, microcontent assumes its own aesthetic parameters. Though written by professional journalists, these blog entries conform to the style of the blogosphere, e.g. off-the-cuff opinion replete with typos and other errors, giving them a street-level authenticity lacking in heavily structured and edited news copy. Microcontent reflects a society both levelled by democracy and disillusioned with power structures. It also suggests a reassertion of latent orality.

The “lowered barrier[s] to entry” make it far easier to generate or read microcontent “than beginning an article or book” (Alexander, 2006). We now “find our own micro-audiences among friends and colleagues; we self-reference and share” (McCallum, 2007). Indeed, a conceit of microcontent is its promise of turning us all into writers and editors – even into librarians, given the rise of folksonomy, which is itself microcontent in that tags shrink the catalogue record (or citation) down to personal informality, subverting librarian notions of “authority record” and “authority control” and replacing them with democratic (and, again, amorphous) tag clouds.

The question might be: can we trust ourselves in place of professionals. Like the term “microcontent”, “factoid” is a word of ambiguous usage, connoting both brief fact and dubious claim. (When Norman Mailer coined it in the early 1970s, he meant lurid, distortional journalism.) Microcontent may assume similar baggage, as shared and shuffled ‘chunks’ become increasingly decontexualized, their origins suspect. Alexander and others herald microcontent’s potential in social learning and fostering expression among students. But it also poses educational challenges. As fragmented and fluid social currency, microcontent can undermine important concepts like intellectual property, not to mention personal accountability, gravitas, and the finality of a finished product, all of which demand (and teach) care and precision (McCallum 2007). The bigger challenge is "getting social software adopted in meaningful ways within schools" (Sessums, 2006).

Alexander, Bryan. "Web 2.0: a New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?." Educause. Mar.-Apr. 2006. 28 Nov. 2007 .

McCallum, Larry. "Re:Connection of Web2.0 and Pedagogy." Making Connections. 5 Dec. 2007. 5 Dec. 2007 .

Sessums, Christopher D. "Cultural Implications of Social Software, Teaching, and Learning: Ready or Not." Eduspaces. 20 Dec. 2006. 2 Dec. 2007 .