Andrew Dubber     

Reading room at the British Library

I’m writing a book. I know I’ve done this before, but this is different. This is one of those ‘the book I always meant to write’ books. It’s big and ambitious, and I don’t know how long it will take me or whether it will even ever be, in any useful way, finished.

I twittered about this on the way back from London. I said that it’s pretty much about everything in the world ever – which is sort of true. But I’ve started by getting a spot of research done, and there will be a lot more research besides. This is going to be one of those books where a lot of knowledge will have to siphoned in from all other sorts of places.

So I spent a good four or five hours in the 2nd floor Humanities Reading Room at the British Library looking at some stuff about Marshall McLuhan, just to get me started. He’s kind of the cornerstone of the thinking – or at least the springboard into the basic premise.

What’s it about, Dubber?
I’m trying to think of a simple way of explaining the central thesis of the book. In my head, it’s very clear – but I’m not quite sure I’m ready to launch into a defense of the idea just yet. I’ve mapped out some areas to cover and it’s going to be a fairly broad-ranging work. In order to do it justice, I’m going to have to bring some of the following areas into play:

Technology, Media Theory, Economics, Education, Physics, Aesthetics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, History, Sociology, Literary Criticism, Anthropology and Mathematics (Game Theory, specifically).

It’s a little daunting, and I want to do each of them justice, though I only have at best a vague grasp of the basics in each area, and each will only be playing a supporting role in the construction and support of the overall thesis – which, in a nutshell, suggests that digital technology makes us, as human beings, different.

There – that wasn’t so hard to encapsulate, was it? Stuff is digital, so we are different.

But I’m going a bit further than that. Not that we think differently or act differently (though, obviously that’s true) – but that we are different. A different category of human being.

Homo Digitalis – Digital Man
A long time ago, I had thought this was going to be my PhD Thesis, but I abandoned it because it seemed to be more of a life’s work than a big essay. This all happened when my Masters dissertation about Digital Radio spiralled out of control a little (into all of the above realms).

A basic skeleton structure for the book (notes not included)

It’s been haunting me more and more the past few weeks, and so I thought I’d see if I could actually map out a structure for such a book so that I could at least have a framework on which to hang everything.

And now I do.

I may not mention this again for a while. It’s processing and bubbling away in the background. I’ve been asked if I’m going to blog the writing process. I may actually start with an article or two and get some discussion going – but for now, I’m just going to let it brew.

Obviously this both draws from and feeds into the stuff I’ve been doing on New Music Strategies for some time, where my mantra has been ‘you have to understand the media environment…’ – but it puts it into a more universal context.

This is not about how to make money from music – though it will, naturally, cover making money and musicianship. Art and commerce. Culture and economics.

I’m really energised by this and excited to get properly started. I know it’s going to be a long haul, but I’ve had this sitting in a (conceptual) drawer for over 6 years now and it’s time to get it out, dust it off and give it some attention.

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