Radio in the Digital Age
2013 completed Author with Polity Press
A book about what radio is, and what it becomes, once broadcasting stops being the only way to do it. Polity Press, 2013.
Radio in the Digital Age was published by Polity Press in 2013 in its Digital Media and Society series: Dubber’s first sole-authored, traditionally published book, and the distillation of a career spent first making radio and then thinking about it.
Its argument begins with a refusal: radio is not a technology, so its digital “disruption” cannot be understood as one technology replacing another. Radio is a set of practices, institutions and relationships with listeners, and each of those changes differently as the transmitter stops being the only way in. The book works through what persists and what transforms, music radio, talk, news, drama, the DJ, the audience, when radio becomes something you can make in a bedroom and distribute to the world, and proposes ways of understanding the medium that do not depend on the mast on the hill. It remains in print and on reading lists in media and broadcasting programmes.
