TSV 3
Call for Papers: Collective Navigation

Proposals due
Friday, December 6
Details below
Photo by Atanas Dzhingarov

The Side View emerged during a moment of uncertainty and transformation.

One of our central aims, to make sense of how we make sense, is a direct response to the increased levels of noise, polarization, and confusion that pervade our traditional and social media systems. TSV launched in this context alongside a host of new media platforms that, exhibiting something like a collective immune response, emerged spontaneously nearly at the same time to counter a shared sense of ambivalence about our legacy institutions.

While uncertainty remains high, this is also a time for positive change.

The barrier to communication has never been so low. If our collective sensemaking systems previously relied on—for better and worse—tightly controlled institutions and networks, they now take the shape of 10,000 minor voices.

At once local and distributed, this new landscape of sensemakers prefers to exist in the ephemeral spaces of social media, wikis, DM groups, and podcasts. These are environments that host living and dynamic conversations, generating exploratory modes of inquiry that make sense of the present moment from multiple perspectives, geographic locations, and disciplines of practice.

As individuals, our ability to intuit the shape of the future remains limited, but this individual uncertainty has become a collective opportunity. So, in what does this opportunity consist?

We are, as a collective, developing new organs of perception.

It’s time for the sensemaking conversation to address this reality, combine these active threads, and coalesce in a single location, letting these voices crystallize into a few explicit statements that can then be carefully contemplated, evaluated, and responded to.

These emergent dialogues have formed around a network of concepts—attractors for action that orbit phrases like ecology of practices, metamodernism, decentralization, memetic mediation, Game B, integral philosophy, collective intelligence, the meaning crisis, warm data, and sensemaking. These concepts and frameworks have been deployed to challenge and transfigure our own faculties of understanding.

This is a call to participate in the unfolding of this conversation.

We invite papers of 1500–3500 words for this special issue of The Side View Journal. Topics should relate to the above themes, and can take the form of basic introductions, comparative pieces, critical challenges, practical demonstrations, or theoretical advances in our thinking about these ideas. The final issue will include 10–15 articles.

The central prompt is a simple question, How do these concepts help us understand the present moment?

Please submit an initial pitch by Friday, December 6, including your name, proposed title, and a short description of your essay, to adam@thesideview.co or by using the form at the bottom of our submissions page here:

https://thesideview.co/submissions/

In contrast to earlier issues, these articles will be released on a single day in early 2020.

We look forward to deepening the conversation.

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