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 context-independent 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.