The moment some wonder new musical gizmo was invented, my man would of course buy that too. But it was notable that his studio contained every electronic keyboard and every computer that he had ever possessed, some very old and basic, all stored in working order. In his mind, one was not necessarily better than any other. By this reckoning a genuine early Moog synthesiser is as relevant as the Hammond organ it replaced, back in the days of the phenomenon known as "progressive" rock. He was not a guitar man, and if he was his task would have been absurdly easy, since the Fender Stratocaster, to name the most famous example of an electric guitar, has scarcely changed in 45 years. It is, as Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones is wont to say, simply "the hardware department".

Lo-Tech, then, is not costume drama. It is not much to do with the conservation movement, though nostalgia certainly comes into it - this explains about half of the enduring appeal of the Mini car for instance, when there are endless better and cheaper small cars to be had. The other half, however, is to do with a liking for directness and responsiveness and simplicity, as an escape from cushioned comfort and elaborate electric add-ons. A Mini owner may well also own an airconditioned BMW: the one does not exclude the possibility of the other.

At the recent, wildly successful, London and Glasgow showings of "Shockheaded Peter", a musical melodrama based on Heinrich Hoffman's 1847 German spoof-cautionary tales "Struwwelpeter", the set commanded attention as much as the actors and musicians. This was for the opposite of the usual reasons. Where a high-tech, moving set can draw applause on its own - usually the sign of an unbalanced production - this was a deliberately clumsy carpenter's job, squeezing the actors and singers into a tiny box with false perspectives like an enlarged Punch and Judy show. Difficulties with the set and its endless doors and hatches and curtains was part of the business of the production. Low budget? Certainly, but a bare stage and some clever lighting would have been cheaper still: "Shockheaded Peter" (returning to Britain this autumn after a European tour) is a thoroughly convincing celebration of theatrical Lo-Tech. Its constraints do not prevent the show from being either genuinely frightening at times, or, conversely, maniacally funny.

Go to the new Canon Photographic Gallery at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and see how the earliest, Fox Talbot direct-print photographic techniques are being taken up by a new generation of artists. The first show is topped and tailed by photographers 150 years apart using the same primitive method. This mood is reinforced by conceptual artist Cornelia Parker's latest show at the Serpentine Gallery, where her beautiful prints of, for instance, feathers also use 1840s techniques. Just because video art exists - such as that by last year's Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing - does not render obsolete the hand-crafted output of a contemporary artist such as Parker.

These are individual examples, straws in the wind perhaps, but consider: in 1982, when film producer David Puttnam contributed to broadcaster Brian Wenham's book "The Third Age of Broadcasting", he, like everyone else in the business, assumed that live cinema was in its death throes. Video recorders and proliferating satellite and cable channels would finally kill off the old fleapits. Scarcely had the book come off the presses than a huge explosion in multiplex cinema-building, and a staggering growth in audiences, began. Puttnam was wrong: somehow the availability of the new broadcasting technology seemed to encourage the old medium rather than eclipse it. Just as the explosion in very sophisticated computer games seems to have helped the old theme parks rather than closed them down.