We've been discussing Pixels vs. Print for weeks, and Richard Romano does a great job when he slices, dices, and skewers the argument that electronic media is somehow "greener" than print in How Green is My Media?

There are times when the value of paper hits home - hard!

Stephen Shankland, who writes for CNET's DeepTech column, has been trying to eliminate paper from his life.

We have some advice for him, if he'll just listen! "Stephen, not all paper is created equal..."

In his post, "My so-called paperless life," he starts off:

I expected problems from my attempt to rid myself of the paper in my life. What I didn't expect was this complication from my wailing 4-year-old son, Levi: "Daddy, why did you recycle all my pictures?"

That 4-year old voice helped him realize that "some physical objects have value that doesn't easily transfer to the bits of their electronic representation. There's a great divide between the physical and the virtual."

Shankland offers 5 points for those who want to go paperless, but it's number 5 that is the clincher:

I love history, I've accumulated plenty of items that, although mundane at the time of their creation, accumulated some historic or sentimental value. The guest book entries (Thomas A. Edison!) at Hermit Creek Camp in the Grand Canyon where my great-grandfather worked, for example, or my grandfather's Depression-era daily expense log.

The big question for me is how close electronic documents will come to holding the same value as their physical counterparts?

Conclusion?

Richard Romano gives us all the scientific reasons that paper is better than electronic media when you consider its electronic footprint, but Stephan Shankland identifies the emotional connection to paper that is really the heart of the problem.

There are simply some things that cannot be delivered electronically!