April marks my sixth month as an editorial assistant in the app development industry. I find this very hard to believe, not because I haven’t grown fond of the “tablet revolution,” but because I can still recall, very clearly, just how skeptical I was of the iPad when I first moved to New York. Granted, this skepticism was probably ameliorated by Apple’s iPad marketing scheme at the time, as billboards depicted anonymous bodies, laps cradling the tablet with unconvincing comfort.
Over the months, I’ve become well-acquainted with the device: its syncing tendencies, its quirks, its rather limited selection of default background images. And though I appreciate the revolutionary capabilities (and have finally chosen the Japanese cherry blossoms for my home screen), I still question what it means to be an editor in this new-fangled world of interactivity.
A year ago, when I was still hanging around the college library, “editorial assistant” evoked an old-school charm, conjuring images of cluttered desks, stacks upon stacks of manuscripts, a coffee mug stuffed full of multi-colored pens. But here and now, my desk is pristine, rid of “stuff.” Everything I need is on my iPad.
This lack of paper, however, is not the only matter of physicality to which I’ve had to adapt. Simply put: the iPad is all about touch. The emphasis on users’ dexterous navigation through words (and their more layered or “vertical” digestion of them) has altered my work dramatically. My editorial vocabulary has been re-vamped, as MLA jargon is now supplemented by more action-packed verbiage; tap, swipe, slide, flick, pinch, drag, shrink, and spread are all used on a daily basis. Our company meetings, too, are driven by gesticulation, and I have often felt endangered as my co-workers swipe wildly in the air to enforce their points, dramatically tapping the table to demonstrate interface.
In my day to day life, I use the term “nav bar” twice as much as “oxford comma;” “functionality” thrice as much as “text.” Instead of proofreading line by line, I review text from “hotspot” to hotspot. Wording, for me, is no longer the sequential conveyance of an idea, but a cluster of units – prone to exist in endless configurations, to reoccur as animated pop-ups, to be sporadically activated by “multi-finger” gestures and, in some cases, to be overpowered by design (and the tablet’s ever-increasing aesthetic capabilities) altogether.
The definition of editing is much more fluid than I realized; and I finally know that this is okay. If anything, my position in the ever-jumbled world of U/I, U/X, and gamification only confirms the lasting need for clear, impacting content to hit us more directly, rid of gimmicks. Poetry still feels safe. Fiction doesn’t need hotspots. But who am I to say what change is on the way.