Whoops! I dropped an inappropriate rant!

Information wants to be free, cars desperately need to be cruising up and down the avenue, and two songs together on a hard drive can't help but copy themselves again, and again, and again all night long until their spawn is sprayed halfway to China and back.

The fact is, that as biological organisms we will always grab for gratification at the lowest personal expense but in doing so, we create a pressure towards lower cost and lower quality. As psychological entities we have such distorted judgment of value that we may hardly realise this is happening.

The shine of an apple. The umami of a hamburger. The stylistic appeal of the boy(girl) band. The endorphin rush of overconsumption. All biological indicators of quality that have been subverted, and distilled, and detached from their original contexts to become the little truths that conceal deception.

Likewise news is being broken down into its basic ingredients and sprinkled liberally on the days events to give us the sense that we are feasting on the real thing. Celebrity gossip. Political dogma. Daily trivia. Everything gets seasoned and plated and served to us as news - not because it is actually of value, but because it is cheap and we will believe it is.

We need to start understanding the difference between quality and the appearance of quality and start realising that gratification is not happiness. The cost and the value of a thing are not completely divorced from each other - whether it be in the greater personal cost enhancing the experience of a thing, or in the thing itself being improved through the investment of time and care.

It is worrying that as we make decisions that may jeapordise - or change forever - the things we value, we may not have a proper understanding of what their true values are. Paper or digital is just a question of medium, but the form and structure that supports the news media of the future needs to support the news we need, not just the news we think we want.

Paris, because what she is and what we want to think she is are probably not very closely related.