Editing in the Digital Present

Abstract

The story told here about the recent past is one of continuous interaction between present and past, as new ‘affordances’ throw up new forms of selection, shaping and linking. The chapter follows acts of editing as they travel to new places in the circuit of communication, expressed in evolving terms such as ‘useability’, ‘filtering’ and ‘curating’. Greenberg pinpoints the factors influencing survival in the digital present, particularly the transfer of editorial labour from producer to consumer, a shift from pre- to post-publication, and a growing concern about the balance between human and computer mediation. The chapter locates in the early years of web publishing and social media the roots of an anti-editing rhetoric, expressed in the ideal of ‘the unedited voice of a single person’.