Emergences, Volume 12, Number 2, 2002 Digital Editing as Cultural Practice :: a merger a margin a mark 1 LISA McDONALD School of Communication, Information and New Media, University of South Australia in tr od u ct i o n … locale, the settings in which social relations are constituted (these can be informal or institutional); location, the effects upon locales of social and economic processes operating at wider scales; and sense of place, the local ‘structure of feeling.’ (Agnew, 1993, p. 263) ‘Culture’ can be thought of as a term which identifies human experience in selective and organized ways, lending significance to the forms through which people make sense of their daily lives (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 26). This paper explores what happens when human experience and sense-making inhabit spaces beyond usually recognizable social forms and systems, namely, the electronic systems of computer mediated communications (CMC). Specifically, I examine the spatial processes involved in ‘new media’ editing of digital images, focusing on an edit (the cut) as a place of cultural habitation. I explore what occurs when editing practitioners work between real/material and virtual/digital environments, so extending notions of ‘lived’ social space into practices displaced through the technoscience of CMC. New media (non- linear) editing forms a swift interplay between absence and boundary in ISSN 1045-7224 print/ISSN 1469-5855 online/02/020235-19  2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1045722022000059399