Tapu Misa: Stick to the straight and narrow in your emails

Far be it for me to offer helpful advice to a new National MP, especially one who is being flayed for sending an ill-judged missive to an Auckland high school principal but, as it's nearly Christmas and I'm feeling public-spirited, here it is.

Dear Allan Peachey: Forget the humour and irony when emailing people you hardly know. They won't get it, and they probably won't forgive it. So next time you feel like ending an email declining an invitation to a high-school prizegiving with "P.S. Yes, I do have a knife in your back, so be careful!", resist it.

By the time your light-hearted if not wholly innocent little joke reaches the inbox of the intended recipient, mere nanoseconds later, it will have taken on an entirely different character.

Your silly, throwaway line will have become a clanger of major proportions, an "unprovoked, malicious, unethical and inexcusable" attack, as PPTA president Debbie Te Whaiti described it.

And everyone, especially those somewhat blinded by political opportunism, will have missed the exclamation mark at the end of your postscript, which was, of course, meant to denote your lack of seriousness, that you were "just kidding".

But there you go. Who knew online communication could be so fraught with danger and misunderstandings? Well, just about all of us by now.

Yet while increasing numbers of us continue our love affair with email - preferring the orderliness of our inbox to messier human interaction - the New York Times says internet addiction services in the US have identified a specific chemical rush, a dopamine high, from online activity, which can be generated by something as simple as receiving an email.

We still haven't quite caught on to its limitations (you can't deadpan in an email, no matter how hard you try), or its power to undo us in a rather spectacular and public fashion.

We all know that emails written in anger should be put on hold for at least a day before pressing the "send" button, and sending sensitive emails to our entire address book by mistake is not a career-enhancing move.

But learning to have a healthy respect for the power of our hastily written messages hasn't taken hold.

It's not just that email is seductively easy and instantaneous. In the case of those two legal secretaries in Australia, who committed electronic hara-kiri with their public email stoush a few months ago, making international headlines and getting themselves fired in the process, it seems email made it much easier for them to be nasty to each other, to say the sorts of things they might have hesitated to say face to face.

It's so much easier to be mean when you can't see the hurt in someone's eyes, which probably explains the rise of bullying by internet and text.

There's also a certain solidity and power to the written word. The things you write don't disappear into the ether, though sometimes I wish they would. They take on a life of their own, and never really go away.

I discovered this a few years ago when a reader reminded me of a theatre review I had written 20 years before. It wasn't a good review, which probably accounts for my having deleted it from my memory, but he had kept it, amused by my reference to the women in the play being "glorified props" - a line which had greatly annoyed the playwright.

But ever since then, my correspondent had called one of the actors in the play, a friend of his, "a glorified prop".

Still, I'm grateful for email because it makes it so much easier to say "no", which is difficult for someone of my cultural persuasion to do without feeling rude.

Then, too, email is infinitely preferable to the telephone, or at least, talking on the telephone, which is something that I and members of my family have an almost pathological dislike of. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's the inability to read body language and facial cues.

Symptoms include promising to call each other knowing we'll never do it - if I didn't call you back, don't take it personally - and getting our husbands and wives (who, luckily, are more garrulous, telephone-friendly individuals) to make our calls.

As for those emails, I find the "kiss" principle invaluable - keep it simple stupid. Humour and irony should only be tried by highly skilled professionals with years of training and experience, people who don't need smiley faces to convey their humorous or ironic intent - a group that, clearly, no longer includes me, given some of the reaction to last week's column on feminism.

I knew my ironic intent had been lost in transmission when one of my regular correspondents, who last agreed with one of my columns in 2004, wrote me an approving email: "Don't fall off your chair, sweetpea, but I agree with 90 per cent of what you wrote today."

Oh dear. Chuffed though I was by the approval rating, I feel bound to confess that I didn't say what she thinks I said.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe that New Zealand is toxic for men (although it is true that some men's groups believe this) and a haven for successful women (although it is true that some women have done very well indeed), and that feminists are anti-men and anti-family (although a few may be).

That was indeed an overstatement. It was meant to be. (Sorry to disappoint you, sweetpea).

I'm now giving serious consideration to including smiley faces in my columns.