"Photography is indeed a miracle, an invention that allow us to make instant images of anything we see. It has become the peculiar art of our technological age -fast, accurate, largely automatic; an efficient and powerful way of comunicating information; an unmatched way of spanning time and space. No medium of expresion has ever appealed so inmediately to so many people, nor has a medium but spoken language been so universally used. (...) Today we live in a world in which photography is so commonplace we rarely give it a second thought. Yet as individuals we are not only daily consumers of vast numbers of images, but prolific producers as well. (...)"

The Camera - Life Library of Photography (1970)

The above was written by the editors of Life Magazine 37 years ago... well before the digital era but it really seems written for the times we live in.