I found this 2005 photo of the interior of a New York City subway car, and as you can see, there was paper everywhere in the form of tabloids and soft-cover books. I’m not saying no one on the subway in NYC reads a newspaper in 2012–there are a few–and some straphangers still read dead-tree books, but you will never see anything like what’s represented in this photo occur again. It might as well be a shot from the 1940s of men wearing fedoras.

Riders now are, of course, reading smartphones, e-books and tablets. Usually, game-changing consumer electronics take quite a while to catch on (as in the case of record players and TVs) because of imperfections and pricing. But now the future arrives in a hurry, so fast you almost don’t notice the swiftness of the changes.•