re no long lines here, and there’s a desperate feel to the special offers: “Have your prints done here and get a free roll of film.”

Anyone who’s followed the industry would have seen this coming. For years, Kodak, a pioneer in photography, had been laying off thousands of workers in its film division and reinventing itself to become the No. 1 digital camera maker in the United States. Then in January, Nikon announced it was going to phase out of film cameras altogether, the equivalent, one professional photographer said,

I RECEIVED a letter a few weeks ago.

It wasn’t an e-mail message or even a document that had been typed out and printed on a word processor. It wasn’t junk mail. It was a handwritten note that Jay, a friend and blogger from Los Angeles, had sent by mail, along with three CDs worth of compiled music.

I thoroughly enjoyed the music, but the biggest kick I got was the short message, scribbled on a sheet of ruled notepaper. The note, short as it was, brought me back to those days before electronic mail, when you actually had to take pen to paper or use a typewriter to compose a letter, then enclose it in a properly addressed envelope, take that to the post office, get stamps, and drop it in a mail box. Then, depending on where your letter was going and how diligent your correspondent was, you’d get a letter back in a few weeks.

Letter writing is one of those arts that have been lost to digital technology. It took some real time, effort and forethought—ingredients that are rarely found in today’s e-mail messages. More often than not these days, we dash out replies and hit the send button, without bothering to read what we’ve written or check our spelling.

Most kids today will no longer experience traditional letter writing. Schools are teaching them to use e-mail as early as Grade School. Instead of pen pals, they’re more likely to have “text mates” on their mobile phones or friends they chat with on the Internet using instant messaging software.

Parents and teachers who want to teach this lost art to kids can still do it – with the help of a Web site called ReadWriteThink (http://www.readwritethink.org). Go to the Student Materials link and scroll down until you find the Letter Generator, an interactive tool that will illustrate the parts of a letter and step students through the creation of a friendly or a business letter. The Letter Generator will even print out the final letter and envelope.

Another lost art is film processing.

One of the most depressing sights these days is a film-processing outlet that has not yet moved to processing digital photos. There are no long lines here, and there’s a desperate feel to the special offers: “Have your prints done here and get a free roll of film.”

Anyone who’s followed the industry would have seen this coming. For years, Kodak, a pioneer in photography, had been laying off thousands of workers in its film division and reinventing itself to become the No. 1 digital camera maker in the United States. Then in January, Nikon announced it was going to phase out of film cameras altogether, the equivalent, one professional photographer said, o

had to take pen to paper or use a typewriter to compose a letter, then enclose it in a properly addressed envelope, take that to the post office, get stamps, and drop it in a mail box. Then, depending on where your letter was going and how diligent your correspondent was, you’d get a letter back in a few weeks.

Letter writing is one of those arts that have been lost to digital technology. It took some real time, effort and forethought—ingredients that are rarely found in today’s e-mail messages. More often than not these days, we dash out replies and hit the send button, without bothering to read what we’ve written or check our spelling.

Most kids today will no longer experience traditional letter writing. Schools are teaching them to use e-mail as early as Grade School. Instead of pen pals, they’re more likely to have “text mates” on their mobile phones or friends they chat with on the Internet using instant messaging software.

Parents and teachers who want to teach this lost art to kids can still do it – with the help of a Web site called ReadWriteThink (http://www.readwritethink.org). Go to the Student Materials link and scroll down until you find the Letter Generator, an interactive tool that will illustrate the parts of a letter and step students through the creation of a friendly or a business letter. The Letter Generator will even print out the final letter and envelope.

Another lost art is film processing.

One of the most depressing sights these days is a film-processing outlet that has not yet moved to processing digital photos. There are no long lines here, and there’s a desperate feel to the special offers: “Have your prints done here and get a free roll of film.”

Anyone who’s followed the industry would have seen this coming. For years, Kodak, a pioneer in photography, had been laying off thousands of workers in its film division and reinventing itself to become the No. 1 digital camera maker in the United States. Then in January, Nikon announced it was going to phase out of film cameras altogether, the equivalent, one professional photographer said,

days, we dash out replies and hit the send button, without bothering to read what we’ve written or check our spelling.

Most kids today will no longer experience traditional letter writing. Schools are teaching them to use e-mail as early as Grade School. Instead of pen pals, they’re more likely to have “text mates” on their mobile phones or friends they chat with on the Internet using instant messaging software.

Parents and teachers who want to teach this lost art to kids can still do it – with the help of a Web site called ReadWriteThink (http://www.readwritethink.org). Go to the Student Materials link and scroll down until you find the Letter Generator, an interactive tool that will illustrate the parts of a letter and step students through the creation of a friendly or a business letter. The Letter Generator will even print out the final letter and envelope.

Another lost art is film processing.

One of the most depressing sights these days is a film-processing outlet that has not yet moved to processing digital photos. There are no long lines here, and there’s a desperate feel to the special offers: “Have your prints done here and get a free roll of film.”

Anyone who’s followed the industry would have seen this coming. For years, Kodak, a pioneer in photography, had been laying off thousands of workers in its film division and reinventing itself to become the No. 1 digital camera maker in the United States. Then in January, Nikon announced it was going to phase out of film cameras altogether, the equivalent, one professional photographer said,

called ReadWriteThink (http://www.readwritethink.org). Go to the Student Materials link and scroll down until you find the Letter Generator, an interactive tool that will illustrate the parts of a letter and step students through the creation of a friendly or a business letter. The Letter Generator will even print out the final letter and envelope.

Another lost art is film processing.

One of the most depressing sights these days is a film-processing outlet that has not yet moved to processing digital photos. There are no long lines here, and there’s a desperate feel to the special offers: “Have your prints done here and get a free roll of film.”

Anyone who’s followed the industry would have seen this coming. For years, Kodak, a pioneer in photography, had been laying off thousands of workers in its film division and reinventing itself to become the No. 1 digital camera maker in the United States. Then in January, Nikon announced it was going to phase out of film cameras altogether, the equivalent, one professional photographer said,

re no long lines here, and there’s a desperate feel to the special offers: “Have your prints done here and get a free roll of film.”

Anyone who’s followed the industry would have seen this coming. For years, Kodak, a pioneer in photography, had been laying off thousands of workers in its film division and reinventing itself to become the No. 1 digital camera maker in the United States. Then in January, Nikon announced it was going to phase out of film cameras altogether, the equivalent, one professional photographer said, of the Ford Motor Company saying it would stop using internal combustion engines. Canon made a similar announcement in May.

Worldwide sales of Japanese-made digital cameras overtook film cameras in 2002, when 24.6 million digital cameras were sold, outpacing the 23.7 million film cameras, according to the Camera & Imaging Products Association, a Japanese trade group. In 2005, sales of Japanese digital cameras had shot up to 70.2 million, accounting for 92.3 percent of the market.

Yet there was a time when darkroom skills were the last option for improving the quality of a photograph. I still remember working in darkrooms reeking with the smell of chemicals, by the light of a red bulb, dodging and burning an image onto photosensitive paper and, moments later, watching the black and white images magically appear in the developer tray. None of these skills matter much these days. All you need is Adobe Photoshop.

What other arts will one day be lost to digital technology? Will reading books one day be lost to multimedia entertainment? Certainly, TV has already done its damage. Do students today visit the library much less than we did when we were in school? Among the young today, what is the ratio of those who carry an iPod and those who carry a paperback?

Darkroom and other arcane arts are one thing, but it would be a real shame if people stopped reading altogether, simply because they could watch “Dude, Where’s My Car?” on their iPods.