ABSTRACT
As social media is becoming an integral part of everyday life, micro-narratives have become increasingly prominent and attracted the attention in recent years. This chapter examines microfiction, micro-films, and literary app-enabled stories from the perspective of their most prominent feature – micro-ness, which exposes and critiques the social barriers that compartmentalize people. Micro-narratives are characterized by their smallness, shortness, simplicity, and lightness. Events organized by Internet companies, such as the Web Culture Festival hosted by Sina in 2012, further extended micro-narratives to a variety of forms, including web literature, screenplays, calligraphy, paintings, photography, and so on. The dialectics of smallness and largeness manifested in microfiction, micro-film, and literary apps may be explored within the larger sociocultural context. Micro-narratives are a product of the age of prevailing yet tarnished "grandeur". Microfiction, as a product of the latest social networking, creates a new sense of imagined intimacy through a reconsolidation of the author–reader relationship in its (re)production, circulation, and consumption.
