Fragmented Misuse and Misreading: Alternative Integrity of New Media Content

The media industry generally believes that fragmentation is a feature of new media, but in detail, there are misuses and misinterpretations of the word fragmentation. Fragmentation has the meaning of fragmentation and discretization, but many new media content is only small in scale, not broken, nor discrete. Treating "micro" and "small" as fragmentation is neither logical nor factual, and many small things are more systematic and complete than large things. If new media are evaluated by traditional media standards, fragmentation conclusions are often drawn, and then the word fragmentation is misused and misread, which will lead to a wrong negative evaluation of new media. The media industry almost recognizes that "fragmentation" is one of the characteristics of new media communication, but the definition of "fragmentation" is not clear, the typical problem is to define the content "micro, short, small" as "broken", but "micro, short, small" are relative concepts, and "micro, short, small" is not equal to "broken". In the new media world, it is true that it is full of a lot of fragmented information, but many popular short articles and short videos are complete and should not be classified as fragments. From the relativity of fragmentation and completeness, the identification of fragmented English meanings, and the fragmented Chinese meanings, fragmentation of new media content can be re-recognized: many so-called content fragments belong to another kind of completeness, or can be called relatively complete fragments, or even complete existence.

First, small is not equal to fragmentation: complete relativity and systematicness

The definition of "fragmentation" of new media communication in the media industry mainly includes content fragmentation, information fragmentation, reading fragmentation, time fragmentation, space fragmentation, and media fragmentation, audience fragmentation and other aspects of fragmentation. Among them, media fragmentation refers to the emergence of a large number of new media platforms, and the traditional media pattern has been broken; audience fragmentation refers to the huge differences in content acceptance, media selection and acceptance time of the audience, and the overall audience is broken. If there is still a certain objective authenticity in time fragmentation, space fragmentation, and audience fragmentation, then the judgment on content fragmentation is debatable.

For the fragmented judgment of new media content, do not make a theoretical retrospective, first understand what is fragment from the common sense of life, in order to facilitate speech, it is necessary to introduce a word corresponding to fragment: complete. Completeness has nothing to do with scale, tiny does not equal fragmentation, and shortness does not equal fragmentation. Five words and sentences are self-contained, Weibo can also be carried forward and transferred, and short videos also have plots - whether they are complete or fragmented, which has nothing to do with scale, and is related to the internal system. Elephant ears or sparrows, which is more complete? From the perspective of life, of course, the sparrow is more complete, just as the so-called sparrow is small and complete. In the same way, an ant, or even smaller microbes, is more complete than a fan-like elephant's ear, and we agree with the basic common sense that integrity is not about size, but about functional integrity.

Life is like this, and spiritual and cultural products are no exception. The 20 words in "Spring Dawn" or the 200 words in "Dream of the Red Chamber", which is more complete? There is no doubt that the 20-word "Spring Dawn" is more complete. Even if "Dream of the Red Chamber" has 600,000 words by the 80th time, it is still incomplete, and it must be continued for the next 40 times to be called complete. Neither for living organisms nor for spiritual and cultural products can be judged by their completeness by their scale. Completeness is not in size, but in internal mechanism, which is common knowledge of life, but in the field of media, many people judge the integrity of the content only by the number of words, duration and scale of the content disseminated, so that the conclusion of the "fragmentation" of new media content is hastily drawn.

New media platforms do have a lot of fragmented content, which has no beginning and no end, but there is also a lot of small but complete content. Although the short articles on the new media, and even three words and two words will indeed give people a fragmented impression, but a large number of Song words only have a few crosses, more than 90 words are long tones, such as Bu Operator, Sauvignon Blanc, Dotted Lips, HuanXi Sha, Fishing Songzi, Bodhisattva Man, Pluto Phoenix, Butterfly Love Flower, Linjiang Immortal, a Cut Plum and other word cards, fill in words are not more than 60 words, then can we say that today's Microblogs within 140 words are fragmented? If fragmentation is determined according to the number of words, then a large number of Tang and Song poems and song poems can be classified as fragmented, but we know that each Tang poem is a complete work of art - history and reality have countless examples that prove to us repeatedly: the so-called fragmentation of new media content is a suspicious judgment, at least in the form of partial general judgment.

Mobile short video platforms have become very popular, is the short video content on Douyin and Kuaishou counted as fragmentation? In fact, many short videos above Douyin and Kuaishou are complete, and there is a good starting and turning, if it is not fragmented, it can only be said that these short videos are indeed too short, many only tens of seconds, or even more than ten seconds. But are TV short messages long in traditional media? Many SHORT MESSAGEs on TV are only a few tens of seconds, or a dozen seconds, but we will still say that such short messages are complete. Many chapters in "Spring and Autumn" are very short, sometimes even with only one sentence, such as: "Summer and May, Zheng Boke Duan Yu Yan." The next sentence followed: "In the autumn of July, the Heavenly King sent Zaikasa to return to Huigong and Zhongzi." This next sentence has moved on to the next topic— even if the historical record is so brief, we cannot say that Spring and Autumn is a fragment.

Why don't we say that "Spring and Autumn", Tang poems, Song Ci, and Yuanqu are fragmented, nor that TV short messages are fragmented, but that new media content is fragmented, and the "prejudice" in this is not difficult to understand: compared with most of the content in modern books, newspapers, radio, and television, the length is small and small, but if you use this to make fragmented judgments, it is obviously too hasty. From blogs to microblogs, from movies to micro-movies, from long videos to short videos, we use fragmentation to summarize the changes in them, which is really suspected of being judged by intuition.

The British scholar Siegmund Bowman said in the essay "The Quest for Order": "The whole goal of science has always been to interpret the whole as only the sum of parts. "The whole is the sum of the parts", but what is the whole, what is the part, the whole and the part are relative concepts, it is difficult to define: the brain is part relative to the body, but the brain is the whole relative to the brain cells, and the cells are the whole relative to the nucleus. When the whole is separated into more parts, such as the new media decomposing traditional media content into small parts, or it is a small part itself, can it be defined as fragmentation? When scientific research or information content transitions from macro to micro, is it fragmentation? There is a relative question, in the era of traditional media, and even earlier, is the definition of the whole too grand? To answer this question, in addition to introducing the relative concept of "whole", it is also necessary to analyze the etymology and meaning of "fragmentation".

Fragmentation and Discreteness: The Origin and Meaning of Fragmentation

Since the 1960s and 1970s, we have been in the so-called postmodern context, where the decentralization and fragmentation of postmodernism seem to coincide with the "authority" dispersed, the individual is scattered, the center is no longer central, and the "fragmented" judgment is therefore popular. "'Fragmentation,' or fragmentation in English, which originally means complete things, broken into pieces or pieces, was common in the literature of 'postmodernism' in the late 1980s." "'Fragmentation,' which originally meant that something complete breaks into pieces or pieces. The problem of 'fragmentation' in the context of communication science mainly involves the differentiation and 'fragmentation' process of media, audiences and information. ”

The term "fragmentation" has been introduced into many disciplines, and in the fields of sociology, history, literature, etc., "fragmentation" has become a term that tends to be negative and negative, such as in the field of historiography: "Many scholars have begun to worry that more and more research focuses on small issues that have no 'historical significance', focusing on details and ignoring the whole. This is the hidden concern of historians about the fragmentation of research, fragmentation is not useless, fragmentation is also used as an opportunity, because based on fragmentation can prove the value of its own existence: "Modernity turns the fragmentation of the world into its greatest achievement to show off." Fragmentation is the main source of its strength. A world that can collapse into a flood of problems is also a world that can be managed. Some "heroes" look forward to a "chaotic world", so that "heroes" have a place to play.

There are also concepts of fragmentation in literature, such as fragmentation of context: "The so-called fragmentation of context is related to the reality that discourse has been presented as a 'miscellaneous language', specifically that the situation in which discourse is emitted is no longer uniform." The same discourse can have different contexts, and thus have different practical connotations. "The introduction of contextual fragmentation in literature is intended to indicate the diversity of textual interpretations. Context fragmentation is also applicable in the media industry, because different groups have different cognitions of reality, so different groups form different contexts, and with the development of social pluralism, there is cultural pluralism and ideological pluralism, and the number of different contexts has increased significantly, so there is the so-called context fragmentation. Context fragmentation is directly related to audience fragmentation, that is, audience classification is becoming more and more fragmented, and different audiences can be subdivided from the acceptance of content, acceptance time, and acceptance space, that is, audience fragmentation.

From the traceability of the meaning of "fragmentation", it can be seen that fragmentation is a description of "segmentation", "discretization" and "decentralization", but we also need to return to the meaning of the word itself. "Fragmentation" comes from frogmentation, the root of the English word is frogment, which can be translated into fragments, and can also be translated into fragments and fragments, but fragments and fragments have similar meanings, but the meaning is different - fragments are fragments of fragments, and fragments are not necessarily broken. That is to say, fragmentation is only defined from the English fragmentation, it is likely to be misunderstood, fragmentation does not necessarily point to fragmentation, and fragmentation has the meaning, if only stay at the level of fragmentation, there will be an impression of "fragmentation", then the relative integrity of "fragmentation" will be ignored.

We also need to analyze what fragmentation is from the Chinese language itself, and what fragmentation is. The original meaning of "broken" is "stone jing", that is, "stone disintegration", "piece" original meaning is "one divided into two wood", then "fragment" refers to the fragment after fragmentation, and "fragmentation" is the process or state of the whole fragmentation into fragments. It should be noted that some fragments have relative integrity, just as each time in the chapter novel has its relative integrity, then the word "fragment" is not suitable for each time in the chapter novel. The word "broken" defines the meaning of "broken", which is passive destruction, rather than active self-containment, so "fragmentation" is incomplete, broken, and cannot be self-contained. Then, for some physical or spiritual products, whether it is an independently formed fragment or a broken fragment needs to be defined: if it is a fragmented fragment, we can define it with "fragmentation", if it is a self-contained fragment, it cannot be said to be fragmented, but a relatively complete fragment.

Defining the original meaning of fragments and fragments is of great significance for recognizing and evaluating new media content. "Fragments" can have relative integrity, and "fragments" are broken, lost integrity, and are broken things after the integrity is destroyed. In this sense, fragmentation is indeed a relatively bad existence, and placing such a determination on new media content "pollutes" the new media in a sense, and the more serious problem is that this will lead to the inability to correctly recognize the new media content and its expression. Fragmentation is a judgment based on traditional media, but defining and evaluating new media with traditional media will inevitably make the mistake of using ancient laws and modern laws. Using the dogmas of the past to evaluate new things is not conducive to understanding new things, nor is it conducive to the development of new things. In the era of information explosion, short, condensed and exaggerated expressions are more in line with the communication methods of new media and more in line with the acceptance psychology of the audience. Short, condensed is not the same as fragmentation, on the contrary, short, condensed is another kind of completeness, a large number of new media content is constantly proving this.

Third, dissemination and acceptance: fragmentation to zero is not the same as fragmentation

Compared with traditional media, new media content seems to be the result of fragmentation, and some studies believe that "fragmented communication is the main behavioral characteristic of the generation and dissemination of social media content." "Whether it's social media or new media, generalizing it as fragmentation can contain some kind of stereotype. If both new media content and acceptance are seen as fragmented, it is likely to be very different from reality. For example, some people think that fragmented communication destroys the reading of the whole people, and in fact, the popularity of new media has increased the reading volume of many people, rather than decreased, and people who do not read every day or even every year have become people who read every day in the new media era - whether it is WeChat communication, or brushing WeChat circle of friends, including brushing Weibo, which has greatly improved people's reading volume compared with the past.

Of course, many people are not only concerned about the amount of reading, but also about the quality of reading, and the evaluation of the effect of fragmented reading is generally low: "'Fragmentation' means that the reading time is no longer coherent, but is divided into minutes or even seconds, generally lasting within 30 minutes at a time; the content of reading is no longer complete, the theme is complex, and it is mainly fragmented and fragmented only words, small short texts or out-of-context meanings in the classics." "This is from the fragmentation of time, fragmentation of content, the definition of fragmented reading, if there is some rationality in time fragmentation, then the definition of content fragmentation is rash, because as mentioned earlier, even if the content is very brief, it also has its completeness, and should not be arbitrarily defined as fragmentation."

In the eyes of some commentators, whether the content is relatively complete or broken, "fragmentation" is a bad existence: "'Fragmented' reading has to a certain extent disintegrated the inheritance of human classic culture, especially the immortal works accumulated in the printing age." In fact, in the era or environment without "fragmented" reading, the inheritance of human classical culture may be more difficult, after all, new media is beneficial to the inheritance of human classic culture to some extent.

The widespread use of new media, or the emergence of digital media, has caused many people to worry about the integrity of learning system and information dissemination: "Digital media content is mainly fragmented information, and what readers get from it is basically fragmented cognition." As far as fragmented information as a whole is concerned, its content narrative lacks logic, the order of chapter arrangement cannot be discussed, and readers can freely travel between network pages and various fragments, with the result that a large amount of fragmentary information is flooded with cognitive systems, which is bound to cause superficial and even incomplete cognition. "The main characteristics of fragmented reading are 'instantaneous reading' and 'superficial comprehension', which instinctively reject deep reflection and criticism, and the expression that best caters to this reading habit is the fashionable aesthetic experience of sensationalism, grand scenes, and wonderful stimulation." "Compared with traditional reading or paper book reading, which is serious, thick, deep and coherent, digital reading is characterized by randomness, lightness and fragmentation. Many experts, researchers, and people in the publishing world have expressed concern about the trend of 'fragmented' reading, believing that this reading habit will lead to a cultural regression and the collapse of authority. Obviously, the above three paragraphs have made a negative judgment on "fragmentation", of course, the meaning of "fragmentation" itself contains brokenness and incompleteness, based on the meaning of such words itself, it is naturally difficult to draw positive conclusions. However, there is a lack of precise definition of "fragmentation" in this, and there is an obvious suspicion of partial generalization.

For the recipient, of course, the system acceptance is the best, otherwise it is likely to be chaotic and not systematic, but unfortunately, the state of many people's access to knowledge in reality is like this, even without new media, or worse. There are a hundred reasons to advocate systematic learning of knowledge and access to complete information, but there are also enough reasons to affirm the "fragmented" dissemination of new media. In the era or environment of no mobile new media, the knowledge and information people get from small talk is fragmented or even completely fragmented, but we cannot deny the information dissemination and knowledge transmission role of small talk, especially in the social environment where information is not developed, if small talk is canceled, then people will become more and more closed, thus appearing ignorant.

In the era of mobile new media, a large amount of new media content is another kind of small talk, and it is a small talk of countless people, and its diversity of forms, richness of content, and the ability to cross time and space are far beyond the real small talk. "Taken as a whole, the oldest wisdom of life is plato's dialogue with Socrates, and online reading is often a kind of conversation or dialogue." Although the content of new media is muddy and mixed, full of a large amount of spam and harmful information, "fragmentation" is not the best summary of the dissemination and acceptance of new media.

It is necessary to face up to the reality that many so-called fragmented judgments are not accurate, so that relatively complete fragments are also classified as fragments, and although the scale is small and the length is short, it has relative integrity, not broken content, and should not be classified as fragments. Even if the content is fragmented into zero, it is not equivalent to fragmenting the content, in fact, the broadcast of TV series is to be fragmented into zero, and the continuous broadcast of reviews is also fragmented, but we cannot say that such a fragmentation is fragmentation, then we cannot say that brushing Weibo, brushing WeChat, and brushing vibrato are fragmented acceptance, in fact, its acceptance is more complete than accepting TV series and listening to reviews, because a microblog, a WeChat, and a vibrato video is a self-contained system, relatively complete.

Of course, new media do disseminate a large number of incomplete "fragmented" content, but it cannot be said that new media communication is fragmented communication. Once some consensus is formed, industry terminology and industry perceptions are difficult to change, so it is foreseeable that the definition of fragmentation and the many cognitions derived from it will continue to exist. However, when the media community makes fragmented judgments, it should be vigilant that the so-called fragmentation is probably not fragmentation, that may be an alternative integrity of new media content.

epilogue

Fragmentation is not the sin of new media, and many fragmented judgments belong to the ancient law of the present, measuring new things by old things, and even using old things as the standard to belittle new things. New media content does have a lot of fragmentation, but fragmentation is not due to short length, but because of the lack of structure or content. The "guilt" of the new media is likely to be wrongfully judged, misjudged, wrongly judged, and the main reason for making mistakes is that there is a problem in the definition of "fragmentation" - the mistake defines short and short length as fragmentation, and does not see the integrity of the short length itself.

(Omitted citations)