‘The past went that-a-way’: editing in the rearview mirror?

Marshall McLuhan used the metaphor of the rearview mirror to describe one of the most common reactions to new technology. McLuhan argued that, confronted with technological innovation, we fall back on our past engagements with technology and ignore its new potential. In some ways, digital editing can be seen as one of the great success stories of the World Wide Web, but too often our understanding and implementation of the idea of an edition is shaped by our print experiences. We carry over practices which were shaped by the structure, cost and logistics of print production. Moreover, just as McLuhan suggested that we ignore what is heading towards the windscreen while we focus on the rearview mirror, our preoccupation with translating print practice into a digital environment means that we forget about the immense and increasingly pressing issues presented by the growth of born-digital information. The type of editorial methods derived from print practice will not cope with the vast scale of born-digital data or take full advantage of the metadata and other information associated with it. These issues are considered with references to such cases as email archives, social media and Wikileaks data.