A writer is brought up sharply by a long-lost friend who opines that their exchange of e-mail can hardly be called "staying in touch." Where is the intimate exchange of reflection -- let alone the art of narration -- that came with the handwritten letter? And what happens to a culture when the art of literacy is lost? PNS associate editor Andrew Lam makes his living by writing. (lam@pacificnews.org)

Thanks to the Internet, I have over the years managed to get back in touch with many long lost friends. But one of them recently sent me an e-mail complaining that, now that we are communicating on the regular basis, she actually misses me more, not less.

Astounded by the seemingly paradoxical statement I immediately hit reply: "L. what on earth do you mean?" And within half hour or so her e-mail came back with a strangely familiar passage in quotation marks.

"Late last night the rain fell. It dripped and dropped against my window sills announcing the departure of a lethargic winter. Yet L. I must confess, I didn't mind the winter nights. What I fear is the warmth of summer. When my skin turns bronze and my body is ripened for love, when that afternoon sun lingers a bit too long on my shoulders, oh L. I get in trouble."

Only when I got to the end did it dawn on me that it was my own writing. I wrote this passage to L. more than a decade ago in a handwritten letter, something I regret to report that I rarely do these days.

L. concluded with satisfaction: "See what I mean? Where is the writer of this letter now? We e-mail, but are we really in touch?"

Her's is a fair accusation though L., too, has stopped writing those expressive letters. Since we communicate by e-mail, we say things that are neither deep nor profound. Indeed, we are communicating again after some silent years, but L. and I communicate badly. Our electronic correspondence stays on this shallower side of the lake, and our prose, if such a thing can be called prose, is only a bit wittier than the yellow pages of the phone book.

"How's it going?" I would ask in one message. "Bye."

"Went to see Stomp last night," L would answer in another. "Fantastic. But my kid 's crying. Got to go. Love."

My suspicion is that in a world where we are constantly chatting, very little is actually being said. We substitute human emotions with those strange symbols. :-) and :-( , hoping somehow these colons and exclamation points could substitute our sensibility and taste and convey the nuances of our lives.

The U.S. Department of Education recently supported my suspicion. Last October it found that only one in four students in high school, both public and private, can write "at a level of proficiency necessary for future job success." The survey also found that while students are often capable of "social chit chat," language for the purpose of narration or argumentation is beyond them.

So with speed and easy access, the first few casualties may be depth and style but I fear, as the whole society takes on that chat room atmosphere of a Jerry Springer talk show, the last might be literacy itself. "She was, like, you know, so mad..." or so the housewife on a talk show began this morning, "and like I don't know why." Neither did I, to be honest, but her incoherence made me wonder what happens to language and ideas in a country where people are less self reflective and yet, at the same time, as if cursed by Andy Warhol, more expressive?

To live in the information age is in a way, to live in a modern day Tower of Babel. One is constantly communicating - with cell phones, e-mails, pagers and chatrooms - but one may very well be out of touch. One gets on the "right" side of the digital divide but one might have to pay a price: language is streamlined and intimacy is forsaken for the high valued currency called information. Soon, I fear the thick novel of Tolstoy and Melville and the like will fall by the wayside as Americans will fail to understand or, for that matter, to create language that is complex and substantial.

These days I find the only people who write good letters are the old or those living in refugee camps or in countries not yet "wired." The dispossessed refugee, especially, robbed of his home, his future uncertain, becomes the consummate writer. She picks up her pen and begins to bleed herself into words.

For the rest of us in this age of mobility and information, there simply isn't any time for such a thing as a long flowing, hand written letter. Odd, isn't it, in a world where one does not need fire to boil water or a teller to withdraw cash, there isn't any time left to complete a whole paragraph?

I am, alas, no exception. The impulse to write a hand written has long left me. I am not unaware of the irony: Me, a writer who makes a living out of writing on the op-ed page, finding it harder and harder to write a letter the old fashioned way. Like everyone else, I am an e-mail addict seduced by its split-second convenience, and only on special occasions do I dust off the writing pad and fountain pen to jog down thoughts.

So. Dear L.

I miss you, too, dearly. Especially this sunny morning walking again at our beach, I smelled that salty odor of the sea with its hint of dry kelp and dead fish wafting in the warm air and feel the caressing fingers of summer. I'm sorry I don't write letters anymore, sorry that I've lost the impulse. I am wracking my brain to think of how I can make it up to you. An ad in the paper to say I miss you, perhaps, or a billboard over the exit to your house. Or, maybe, just maybe, an editorial.