It shouldn't come as any surprise that newspapers and books and basically anything you can hold in your hands and doesn't need a charger is basically on its way out. But did you know that printed photographs are going the way of the Dodo bird and Men's Vogue? It's true!

Not that we can back this up with anything like "hard numbers" or "facts" or "camera sale stats," but because Princeton University Press is putting out a giant coffee table book of the first color photographs ever taken, and there's nothing like panicked nostalgia to lead a writer to make broad generalizations about technology.

But as with each of our advances, something else is being lost. It is easy to think of the print and the digital image as the same thing, but they're actually very different. Even as cameras tout their ever-increasing megapixels, nearly everything we view is projected out at 72 dots per inch, the standard resolution of a monitor. The resulting pictures are back-lit, vivid, and very easy to scan, so we hardly notice how hard it is to look into them. Your eyes move side to side, and you can easily gather all the information, but if you linger for a minute - an actual minute - you'll notice that the screen doesn't quite accept your gaze. A printed photograph, however - even when small, or blurry - has a way of letting you in. The paper surface is less aggressive than the liquid crystal one, so your eyes can roam around. The brightness of the pixel has a price: The illusory space of the photo is subtly reduced, along with its invitation to wander - or simply rest - inside it.

This is exactly the kind of annoying "journalism" that gets under our skin. Sure, digital cameras have replaced conventional ones for convenience. Sure, we'll all miss some parts about old technology. But in the days where the unemployment rate is sky-rocketed and digital cameras are cheaper and more accessible (not to mention easier to print or share) than the previous technology, who the hell are you to tell people that they're missing out on the finer pleasures of looking at a picture?