[Air-L] CFP: M/C Journal - Cohesion

[Jaz Choi]

'cohesion'

Cohesion as a term connotes attraction, unity, and commonness amongst discrete entities. Considering cohesion as a concept is timely with the recent rise of network culture, which comes with both small and radical changes in how people connect with, position themselves in relation to, and understand other constituents of society. The need to build bonds between human beings, and to bring together otherwise disparate experiences and aspirations is proving evermore crucial to a sustainable future for the world. But is the current and pervasive understanding of cohesion and its implicit promise of harmony or unity possible, or do we need to look for more nuanced and realistic ways to approach the idea of cohesion?

Anheier et al. have re-imagined Bourdieu's view of the positions individuals inhabit within social spaces as a 'network, or a configuration, of objective relations among positions' (Anheier, et al., 1995).  From this view the merging of individuals or groups into a cohesive whole becomes less important than the coming together, sometimes only briefly, of ideas into a dynamic and complicated matrix. This is not necessarily to question the obvious advantages of a unified society, rather we seek to ask our contributors if there are new ways of approaching cohesion, and what are the implications for the various disciplines.

Similar observations can be made from the technological perspective. Embedded in everyday life, network technologies engender and accentuate multiplicities: multifaceted self-identity, multitasking, and multisensorial experience via multimedia, for example. As we fast transition from the current network era towards that of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), our social and technological systems and practices become modular-like (Choi, et al., 2009), resonating with what Stone calls 'continuous partial attention' (2006). In this environment, it is cohesion that validates a networked entity by giving it a unified form and/or voice amongst its distributed constituents.

In this issue of M/C Journal, we seek a cohesive understanding of cohesion across disciplines on wide-ranging issues such as the meaning of cohesion, how we understand cohesion, and what we can do with our understanding of cohesion.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/information/authors#cohesion

Details

 *   Article deadline:22 Jan. 2010
 *   Release date: 24 Mar. 2010
 *   Editors: Donna Hancox and Jaz Choi

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to cohesion at journal.media-culture.org.au<mailto:cohesion at journal.media-culture.org.au>.



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