What is Fragmental?

While I’ve been ‘researching’ and writing about technology, society, politics, popular culture, music, and other topics for years, I’ve resisted ‘blogging’. In part because I hate the word ‘blogging.”  To me, it’s writing, and there’s certainly no shortage of writers. One more didn’t seem necessary. Except that I am a writer. I’ve made my living from writing and thinking, and thinking about writing, language and ideas, and I thought about how people scour the internet, skipping and surfing, looking for fragments of interest, for bits and pieces of fascination, curiosity, humour and insight.  I do it, and I’m always hoping to find something that intrigues, stimulates or entertains and so I’ve joined the throng to produce, as well as consume. 

I’m also inspired by the desire to move beyond the short posts of Facebook, occasional tweets, and the slow and arduous process of traditional publication in academia where it takes years before carefully crafted, work eventually reaches an audience of  …. well mostly, it seems, zero.

In looking for a name I tried dozens. It was like trying to find a band name. I usually found that someone else had got there first and was already writing, or blogging, industriously under a name that I thought would be unique.

And then I discovered  Fragmentalism, which is a term with quite a few definitions. According to Wikipedia it is an element of reductionism, “a philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.” Fair enough, but “Reductmental” doesn’t quite have the same ring. 

Fragmentalism has also been defined as the notion that knowledge is a growing collection of substantiated facts or “nuggets of truth.” I like that.  Apparently “fragmentalism” has been used in many different disciplines and none of them agree, so its definition is somewhat, um, fragmented. Clearly, there’s a ‘bit’ of a theme developing here.

I prefer Yeats, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”

Wait, there’s more. But not all at once. It’s fragmented. Seriously.