Dialogue: Brave act of cyber resistance

By PENELOPE FROST

Once upon a time I got email but it just passed away and I am not lamenting its demise.

It even had a groovy username, "creative1" - but it is no more. Joe Bennett doesn't like that word, creative, but I thought it was kind of snazzy.

I wish it could be said email served me well but I fear the opposite is true. I'll be the first to admit that email can be really useful and at first I wondered how anyone could live without it.

I "talked" to my family in far-flung parts of the country, my friends on the other side of the world, and even formed a few new friendships. I also kidded myself I was saving the trees.

The trouble is that, like any other form of modern technology, email has its flipside. After a while there was a sneaking suspicion that perhaps I had become more isolated than ever before.

I couldn't admit it publicly, but how often I had sat down to work only to realise that by mid-morning I had done nothing but internet "research". It hardly needed an Australian study to tell me that I was spending the most productive part of my day on absolute rubbish.

And how much of this mail was really necessary - for in a screen full of impatient messages demanding my attention there were usually only one or two remotely worth reading.

Perhaps a few deluded individuals still think email makes us more efficient, when all it does is create more slog.

How much time do you spend checking your mail every morning before you can do some real work? And have you noticed that while email is quick and easy to send, it is also easy to ignore? If you don't want to talk to someone you press "delete" and it is as if they were never on your screen.

And don't forget the dark side of email - Darth Vader would have approved. The unwary who give out personal information to people they don't really know; nerds with no life who let computer viruses loose upon the unprotected, taking advantage of people like me who have obsolete computers that refuse to run the latest virus protection software.

After my computer almost crashed, I decided to kill my email, although it had been slowly dying a natural death anyway. It was also costing me a lot of chocolate cakes persuading a knowledgeable friend to come and fix it every other week.

I let a few people know of my personal protest against the rampages of technology. Then I unsubscribed from some lists that weren't particularly necessary anyway and which were probably there just to make me feel like I had some friends when I checked for new messages.

So far, nobody much seems to mind or even notice.

Now when I contact people it's often by letter. Instead of pressing "delete", I again have the satisfaction of scrunching up things I don't want and throwing them in the bin.

For immediate action I use the telephone. Let's face it, by the time you write a politically correct email that is not too long and rambling but not too brief either, not too friendly but not too formal, and edit it for mistakes, you might as well just pick up the phone and talk to people.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. Don't tell anyone, but I do miss email just a teeny bit. But I have a fax, a phone, and a mobile, too. There is regular mail - the sort with stamps on that comes to your front gate.

If people want to contact me, I hope they will ring or write, and knowledge of my existence will not drop off the face of the known world.

I'm going to enjoy that ritual as I wander outside in the fresh air to my brightly painted letterbox about midday. Yes, the posties are a bit slow around here, but I may get to talk to a real person as they go past.

Perhaps there'll be a few more letters to flick through, to be perused for familiar handwriting and other clues before I open them at my leisure.

Perhaps I'm being naive, and email will eventually creep back into my life - preferably on a shiny new laptop with every virus protection system known to humankind - but for now I'm happy with my brave experiment in living in an email-free world.

I've calculated I should have at least an extra hour to spend working but excuse me, won't you - I have to go and write a letter.

* Penelope Frost is an Auckland writer.