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Appendices: 
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Pattern two: disaggregation
Librarians and publishers are familiar with the term “the least publishable unit,” which referred to e-journal articles at the time they came into vogue. Now, “microcontent” is generally used to describe even smaller units of content that come from some larger whole. As e-journals proliferated, people realized it should no longer be necessary to purchase the entire journal if only one article was required. So, the journal as a definable unit became less important. As more and more content made its way to the Web, the granularity of the least publishable unit increased. It is possible and often even easy to locate a table, a fact, a quote, a picture and single song from what used to be aggregated, monolithic content: books, journal articles, government reports, records and CDs. Increasingly, the information seeker doesn’t care what the original container looked like, and wants to be able to use this microcontent immediately. The information is fungible and the boundaries of the containers fade and blur. Content is disaggregated from its original container. Amazon’s “search inside” ups the ante in this arena, raising consumer expectations that content is searchable and definable at a micro level, and, we predict, payable for—at the micro level. Micropayment for microcontent is the next logical step. Institutions and services, and the technologies that enable them, are increasingly disaggregated. E-learning disaggregates the learning process from the institution as students avail themselves of the “least unit”: a course can possibly be independent of place and time—tied to the parent institution in name only. Banking online reduces “the bank” to a series of activities, and the ordered presentation of a library’s physical collection of content and its highly structured services can be irrelevant and even inhibitory in a digital world. A nine-year-old’s Web page about spiders coexists with a presentation at a conference by the world’s expert on spiders and may be deemed more useful to a nine-year-old searcher than the expert’s paper. It’s about more than just content. It’s about context. We’ll return to this notion of context: it’s really important. |
The second pattern to emerge from the twilight is the rapid and widespread reduction of content and institutions to much smaller units of use and interaction than in the past.