The end of the mechanical age:

Photographs do not move when printed in magazines and newspapers, nor does everyone look at them at the same time. Fixed mechanical reproduction, inextricably bound to the past (photographs are only of what has already happened, after all) has less panache than the more fluid, “real-time” electronic television and its simultaneously interconnected audience. As a result, scanning has replaced reading, and movement in media is increasingly a sign of importance, of having the energy and “penetration” of television.

From our increasingly passive, anxiety-ridden, static position as readers we have become simultaneous serial viewers, participating in a virtual space that continually boasts of its transcendence over mere reality which, in fact, often copies it. Photography makes us stare, aware of our distance from the depicted in time and space, rather than participate safely and virtually, awash in the moving and linked present.