Interactions - January/February 2010

OPINION BETWEEN THE LINES

New York Times Magazine and Wired spoke on “homophily,” the natural tendency for individuals to seek out others who share their preferences. In other words, birds of a feather flock together. Thompson observes that people online are flocking to like-minded people—paying allegiance to “editors” in Twitter and Facebook who are similar to them. But how diverse can the content be? Are we missing out on serendipity? How can we design an experience so that we can accidentally happen upon information we might not otherwise encounter?

Of course, we’re already getting practice as editors: using RSS readers to deliver content from trusted sources; unsubscribing; creating coherence with groups; and perhaps a most interesting recent development, crafting language patterns to communicate. We’re using links via people or groups we follow on Twitter to filter content that matters to us.

For seven centuries, editors
have used symbols to commu-
nicate with one another: proof-
readers’ marks. Proofreaders’
language comprises 42 symbols
that take the place of common
instructions such as “delete,”
“insert comma,” or “begin new
paragraph.” Editorial teams
have traditionally worked in
print manuscripts, passing lay-
ers of proofreaders’ marks back
and forth. The patterns of this
language have not changed
since it was introduced in the
early days of printing. Its effi-
ciency is unarguable—in a 600-
page manuscript, for example,
it allows a single symbol to rep-
resent “insert period” instead
of the inefficiency of writing
that out every time. But these
marks don’t translate well to
editing in digital formats; in
large publishing houses, edit-
ing still takes place in analog
format. Traditional editors
are running up against chal-
lenges as they question how to
translate proofreaders’ marks
into digital manuscripts for
formats like the Kindle. While
digital editing tools such as
Microsoft Word and Revizr help
mitigate some of the digital
issues, they’re far from perfect,
and many houses still rely on
the fusty print manuscript.

Twittergirl: This is a tweet!
Twitterguy: RT This is a tweet!
(via @Twittergirl)

In a recent draft of a paper by danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan from Microsoft Research, they explore the syntax of retweeting and the diverse conventions by which it’s communicated within Twitter. Another practice, the #hashtags—the curious mashups of words and phrases preceded by the hash sign—is also widely used. When it’s included in a Twitter post, it indicates a topic, location, or emotion the user is believed to be addressing.

So from here, where? We’re
now simply making footprints
and leaving signs. While this is
a small step for us as burgeon-
ing editors, it’s a fascinating
departure as, traditionally, an
editor’s role has been an invis-
ible one—one to provide a sort
of statuesque transparency—to
give it form without knowing
he or she is there. The charac-
ter of the medium remained
unchanged, but the transfor-
mation was essential so that
consumers reveled in the media
rather than deliberated over it.
With this change, everything
has shifted downstream. The
footprints and signs of the edi-
tor’s role have moved from pre-
publishing to post-publishing.

Further Reading

“Brooke, Clive and Ethan at Aspen.” On the Media. September 4, 2009; http://www. onthemedia.org/tran- scripts/2009/09/04/06/ Gross, G. Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know about What Editors Do. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Shirky, C. “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Web 2.0 Expo, New York, 2008; http:// web2expo. blip.tv/file/1277460/ boyd, d., Golder, S., and Lotan, G. “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.” Microsoft Research, January 2010.