I have recently ‘come into’ a small sum of money. The story is thus. My elderly father is in hospital and while he’s there has decided he has no actual monetary needs so he’s given me his pension money.  The worst experience he is having in hospital is the thought that when he eventually leaves he will have to go into residential care which he will have to pay for. This is making him anxious and depressed. Amazing isn’t it; the ability to keep people alive with fantastic advances in medicine – adding years to their lives – and then removing those extra years through the stress of seeing a life-time of hard work and savings been taken away to pay for care. I digress.

With this pension money I bought myself a luxury item. An semi-acoustic guitar

Now I do not claim to play the guitar well; this is purely for my own amusement and entertainment. I don’t imagine I’m any of the well know guitar heroes, I just trash out 3 chord tricks or make the thing squeal away in my own personal version of the blues.

What I have noticed though is that there is a qualitative distinction between playing something on an acoustic guitar compared to electrification. Electrical sound adds buzzing, distortion, feedback – and of course is louder. The loudness initially suggests *better than* although I’m not sure why.

So I’m wondering whether the electrification of information has this amplifying effect? Whether the hum of computers, the brightness of screens, the rapid ability to move from one cluster of information to another, the ease at which (some but not all) information can be accessed and retrieved makes us think it’s better?  Does this environment of electricity seduce us into thinking that digital is best, that it has an inherent quality above that of paper, books, libraries, documents, newspapers?

The television is perhaps an example; it’s certainly more animated than a book is; but is it any better in terms of quality? I really, really don’t think so.