When the Editor Disappears, Does Editing Disappear?
Susan Greenberg
Convergence 2010 16: 7
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509347695
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Abstract
With the shift to mass self-publishing on the internet, commentators have hailed - or sometimes mourned - the death of professional intermediaries such as the editor. The question remains, however: does editing disappear along with the editor? The short answer is ‘no’, when one understands editing generically, as an essential part of the process of creating meaning in a text. In reviewing examples on the internet, one sees that it does not disappear, but shifts from a third-party intermediary to the author and the reader, and from human to more automated types of intervention. However, despite the promise of the ‘semantic web’, these kinds of intervention are unlikely to reach high standards on a consistent basis. The absence of experienced human mediation in the writing process - as in other areas of life - can be harmful to public life, and ways should be found to show the added value that they make.
Conclusions
I have argued that ‘acts of editing’ are an inevitable stage in the creation of meaning – if editing did not exist, it would have to be invented – and the question is not whether it happens but who does it, what it is called, and what standard it reaches. However, the case still needs to be made for its recognition, to counteract both cultural and economic pressures on all forms of human mediation.
In some ways, the problems arising from an absence of editing may pale in comparison with the pressures on human mediation in other areas of life. Modern management culture appears to involve a wide-ranging ‘coding’ of daily life: its critics argue that this has created a box-ticking culture that distorts outcomes and creates a false sense of security. What is missing, in such a culture, is human judgement and interpretation, which are hard to measure and standardize, and are therefore suspect. A recognition of editing also goes against the grain of a ‘network culture’ that may be reluctant to discriminate and criticize, to say that A is better than B. As Ball noted in his study of training (2008), editing is nothing if it is not about judgement.
In the meantime, there are signs of a convergence, an intuitive mix of different elements (human and automated, professional and amateur) rather than a binary choice. People look for skills that will give them professional communication skills, even if they do not end up using them in a professional setting. For this reason, practice-based writing and multimedia subjects in higher education are likely to remain popular for some time. Workplaces and other organizations are also putting more resources into editorial training, to enable a wider range of staff to handle ‘acts of editing’. In one very typical example of which I have some personal experience, in 2004 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) introduced a training programme in writing skills for statistical staff, backed by editorial guidelines, when a content management system was introduced.
New media may close some editing doors, but open others. E-publishing has the potential to make the ‘added value’ of editing more visible, for example, by providing annotations or multiple editions. It remains the case, however, that ersatz acts of editing are unlikely to reach the highest standards possible, on a consistent basis, and the absence of experienced third-party intermediaries from the writing process is likely to have an impact on the creation of meaning by written text over time. I would therefore argue that we need to develop new ways of evaluating the added value of ‘invisible’ intermediary work, and that this would benefit not only writing, journalism and publishing, but also many other areas of cultural life and policymaking.
We saw earlier how the experience of digital editing prompted literary scholars such as McGann to develop new ideas about textuality. Does the process work in the other direction – do new kinds of textuality give us new ideas about editing? I am not sure of the answer, but my instinct is that we need to explore the possibility of a ‘poetics of editing’ to find out.
The term ‘poetics’ has come to refer to the principles and forms behind the written art form. But originally it referred to the wider category of any cultural artefact, distinct from nature, and it derives from the Greek root ‘poiein’, ‘to make’. In The Language of New Media, Manovich (2001) explains that he explicitly avoided poetics as a frame of reference, because he felt it was too narrowly focused on the abstract, internal study of the specific properties of particular arts. In contrast, he says: ‘I neither claim that the conventions, elements and forms of new media are unique, nor do I consider it useful to look at them in isolation’ (2001: 12–13). I would argue that in the case of editing, a type of cultural intervention that has not received significant attention to date, a focus on the specific properties of a particular art is still of some use, and so reference even to a formalist form of poetics is valid. If one uses other frameworks such as social constructivism, the focus is on the reading of a text as a socially contingent process, and the ulterior motives of the people doing the construction. While this might be an interesting and valid object of study, it does not focus sufficiently on editing as an activity in its own right. The process of pattern-finding is bound to be influenced by its social and other contexts, but the mere fact of construction does not imply a particular motive.
In any case, I would argue that current investigations of poetics have already moved away from the heavily formalist approach summarized by Manovich. One way of articulating this is provided by Sheppard (2001), who says that poetics can offer ‘a speculative, writerly discourse’ of self-organizing which allows the working out of difficult ideas about how something is to be made. It is a framework that has ‘built into it an awareness of the mobility of text, about what hasn’t yet been written’; it is not a model, manifesto, explanation, description or interpretation. It allows us to consider ‘construction’ in a non-totalizing manner. Kearney (2005) offers another vision of a ‘poetics of the possible’; a critical reinterpretation of the premodern, modern and postmodern imagination, incorporating the lessons learned from the excesses of each. From the postmodern era, the lesson would be to go beyond parody and pastiche, which runs the danger of ‘abandoning the emancipatory practice of imagining alternative horizons of existence’ (2005: 30–1). It would also be to reject the idea that every text is of equal importance, something that precludes the possibility of ethical judgement or critical discernment (2005: 280). If editing is about imagining what a text can be; about the mobility of text and the possibility of discernment, then editing has an existence on the internet, and a poetics of editing has the potential to explore what it may become.
Susan Greenberg
Convergence 2010 16: 7
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509347695
Abstract
With the shift to mass self-publishing on the internet, commentators have hailed - or sometimes mourned - the death of professional intermediaries such as the editor. The question remains, however: does editing disappear along with the editor? The short answer is ‘no’, when one understands editing generically, as an essential part of the process of creating meaning in a text. In reviewing examples on the internet, one sees that it does not disappear, but shifts from a third-party intermediary to the author and the reader, and from human to more automated types of intervention. However, despite the promise of the ‘semantic web’, these kinds of intervention are unlikely to reach high standards on a consistent basis. The absence of experienced human mediation in the writing process - as in other areas of life - can be harmful to public life, and ways should be found to show the added value that they make.
Conclusions
I have argued that ‘acts of editing’ are an inevitable stage in the creation of meaning – if editing did not exist, it would have to be invented – and the question is not whether it happens but who does it, what it is called, and what standard it reaches. However, the case still needs to be made for its recognition, to counteract both cultural and economic pressures on all forms of human mediation.
In some ways, the problems arising from an absence of editing may pale in comparison with the pressures on human mediation in other areas of life. Modern management culture appears to involve a wide-ranging ‘coding’ of daily life: its critics argue that this has created a box-ticking culture that distorts outcomes and creates a false sense of security. What is missing, in such a culture, is human judgement and interpretation, which are hard to measure and standardize, and are therefore suspect. A recognition of editing also goes against the grain of a ‘network culture’ that may be reluctant to discriminate and criticize, to say that A is better than B. As Ball noted in his study of training (2008), editing is nothing if it is not about judgement.
In the meantime, there are signs of a convergence, an intuitive mix of different elements (human and automated, professional and amateur) rather than a binary choice. People look for skills that will give them professional communication skills, even if they do not end up using them in a professional setting. For this reason, practice-based writing and multimedia subjects in higher education are likely to remain popular for some time. Workplaces and other organizations are also putting more resources into editorial training, to enable a wider range of staff to handle ‘acts of editing’. In one very typical example of which I have some personal experience, in 2004 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) introduced a training programme in writing skills for statistical staff, backed by editorial guidelines, when a content management system was introduced.
New media may close some editing doors, but open others. E-publishing has the potential to make the ‘added value’ of editing more visible, for example, by providing annotations or multiple editions. It remains the case, however, that ersatz acts of editing are unlikely to reach the highest standards possible, on a consistent basis, and the absence of experienced third-party intermediaries from the writing process is likely to have an impact on the creation of meaning by written text over time. I would therefore argue that we need to develop new ways of evaluating the added value of ‘invisible’ intermediary work, and that this would benefit not only writing, journalism and publishing, but also many other areas of cultural life and policymaking.
We saw earlier how the experience of digital editing prompted literary scholars such as McGann to develop new ideas about textuality. Does the process work in the other direction – do new kinds of textuality give us new ideas about editing? I am not sure of the answer, but my instinct is that we need to explore the possibility of a ‘poetics of editing’ to find out.
The term ‘poetics’ has come to refer to the principles and forms behind the written art form. But originally it referred to the wider category of any cultural artefact, distinct from nature, and it derives from the Greek root ‘poiein’, ‘to make’. In The Language of New Media, Manovich (2001) explains that he explicitly avoided poetics as a frame of reference, because he felt it was too narrowly focused on the abstract, internal study of the specific properties of particular arts. In contrast, he says: ‘I neither claim that the conventions, elements and forms of new media are unique, nor do I consider it useful to look at them in isolation’ (2001: 12–13). I would argue that in the case of editing, a type of cultural intervention that has not received significant attention to date, a focus on the specific properties of a particular art is still of some use, and so reference even to a formalist form of poetics is valid. If one uses other frameworks such as social constructivism, the focus is on the reading of a text as a socially contingent process, and the ulterior motives of the people doing the construction. While this might be an interesting and valid object of study, it does not focus sufficiently on editing as an activity in its own right. The process of pattern-finding is bound to be influenced by its social and other contexts, but the mere fact of construction does not imply a particular motive.
In any case, I would argue that current investigations of poetics have already moved away from the heavily formalist approach summarized by Manovich. One way of articulating this is provided by Sheppard (2001), who says that poetics can offer ‘a speculative, writerly discourse’ of self-organizing which allows the working out of difficult ideas about how something is to be made. It is a framework that has ‘built into it an awareness of the mobility of text, about what hasn’t yet been written’; it is not a model, manifesto, explanation, description or interpretation. It allows us to consider ‘construction’ in a non-totalizing manner. Kearney (2005) offers another vision of a ‘poetics of the possible’; a critical reinterpretation of the premodern, modern and postmodern imagination, incorporating the lessons learned from the excesses of each. From the postmodern era, the lesson would be to go beyond parody and pastiche, which runs the danger of ‘abandoning the emancipatory practice of imagining alternative horizons of existence’ (2005: 30–1). It would also be to reject the idea that every text is of equal importance, something that precludes the possibility of ethical judgement or critical discernment (2005: 280). If editing is about imagining what a text can be; about the mobility of text and the possibility of discernment, then editing has an existence on the internet, and a poetics of editing has the potential to explore what it may become.
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