De/Contextualizing Information: The Digitization of Video Editing Practices at the BBC

Abstract

The pervasive diffusion of digital media has introduced profound changes to social practices, challenging established notions of embeddedness and context. Based on our case study on the BBC's Digital Media Initiative, we further explore these changes in the domain of video craft editing for television broadcast brought about by the digitization of the video production process. As craft editing is mediated by digital images, its contextual embeddedness is transformed by contextindependent standards of computation and metadata resulting in the erosion of the contextual boundaries of the practice. Given our findings, we argue that in the digital domain, the embeddedness of practices needs to be reconsidered in favor of concepts that account for the peculiarities of digitality and its unprecedented degree of context autonomy.The advent of information and communication technology (ICT) has introduced new societal capabilities for creating and communicating information. In this context, we employ the term practices of de/contextualizing information as a conceptual device to address the peculiarities of creating communication media-in particular, mass media. To be more precise, the term alludes to practices of in-forming a message into a medium in such a fashion that it can be recontextualized and made sense of beyond the confines of the context in which the message is crafted. Thus conceived, de/contextualizing information refers to a fundamental tension; while the crafting of a message itself is embedded into a particular context, the outcome of that crafting (a letter, e-mail, book, TV show, etc.) needs to be informative within the receiver's context as well. Viewed from the perspective of the crafter, therefore, information needs to be decontextualized within the context of the crafter. In our terminology, crafting communication media is a practice of contextualized decontextualization, or de/contextualization in short.Drawing on the sociological concept of double contingency, we focus our attention on so-called craft editors of broadcast television who, we suggest, provide an extreme and, thus, revelatory example for practices of de/contextualizing information as they are creating messages expected to inform not across specific contexts but irrespective of contexts (Luhmann 1996;1998). In other words, the practice of crafting broadcast video has to cope with and, ultimately, overcome the tension of de/ contextualizing information in order to produce a TV series, drama, or documentary that is informative for an anonymous mass audience (Starr 2004). We then analyze how the practice is infiltrated and transformed by the rationale of ICT and digital video based on an embedded single case study (Yin 2003) on the changing practices at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Finally, we demonstrate that in the analogue days the practice of craft editing video was addressing the tension of de/contextualization by oscillating between the context of postproduction and context-independent standards of genre. With the impl...

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