This month I’ve been unusually digital, engrossed in editing audio, staring at my laptop screen moving music and speech around, before checking my emails, reading the day’s news and then relaxing with a movie online. I realised I had become fixated on my screen, completely off with the pixels.

Then I took more notice of those around me, everywhere on trains and planes and street corners and restaurants, people are off with their own pixels, head down staring at a screen like battery hens waiting for the next pellet, obsessively checking messages and Facebook and Twitter, desperate for contact from anyone else who is trapped in their own bubble of digitised information.

There is something empty about digital data. There is no weight to it, nothing tangible, it is all empty calories like eating potato chips all day. After a day of digital activity, I feel faintly queasy, unsatisfied, as if I haven’t actually achieved anything at all. The music I have been editing has been made by humans, but it has no energy, no sense of being real.

It is so easy now to find any music or entertainment online, it begs the question why go to all the bother of attending a concert? Why drive or sit on a train for an hour and park the car and pay for the ticket to see a string quartet, or an orchestra or a musical or a percussion ensemble when you could sit at home and get it all digitally streamed on your smart device?

The answer is simple – because it is human, because it is a shared experience, where the digital world for all its supposed connectivity is cold and lonely.

I have always taken a perverse pleasure in watching disaster films of the post-apocalypse variety, where war or disease or aliens destroy cities and societies. Sitting there in a cinema munching popcorn while the East Coast of the USA slides tectonically into sea is strangely exhilarating. But I would like to see a film where a magnetic anomaly in the Earth’s crust means all of the world’s electricity was sucked into space. After about 12 hours most mobile phones would have died and there would be stunned and helpless people everywhere, staring at blank screens. No radio, no TV, no Internet, they would gather on street corners asking each other what had happened, some still hysterically trying to check their email.

This would be a real blow for the popular music industry, there would be no amplified music at all, every electric guitar, every synthesizer, every Lady Gaga and Beyoncé rendered mute. Elevators would stop and the muzak inside them grind to a halt.

Everywhere there would be silence, only interrupted by the whimperings of those suffering digital withdrawal. Then on a street corner four Conservatorium students would take out their instruments and play a late Beethoven string quartet and people would come, slowly marvelling at music that was made with wood and horsehair. In the Hamer Hall and the Adelaide Festival Centre and QPAC, audiences would thrill by candlelight to the majestic sounds of a symphony orchestra, acoustic music filling those gothic spaces like cathedrals of old.

Eventually someone would find an old printing press and create a newspaper to share stories of the end of electricity. Sure there’d be widespread starvation and an appendectomy might be more painful by candlelight without anaesthesia, but this film would remind us of a world not made out of 1s and 0s but living breathing human beings making living breathing human art.

Earth Unplugged will be the title of my film, and as soon as my laptop boots up and I’ve checked my emails, Facebook and Twitter and done my Internet banking, I will start on the script.

For more of Guy Noble’s wit and wisdom, check out his Soapbox every month in Limelight magazine.