Finding a path in a world full of email

Stop checking for emails every five minutes, don't use your Blackberry when you're talking to friends - it's rude - and think about what you've written before you hit "send".

That was the message from American writer John Freeman at the final day of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival yesterday.

Freeman, editor of Granta magazine and author of The Shrinking World, a book examining the plight of lives ruled by the flood of emails, is striking out for "a manifesto for a slow communication movement", a popular concept judging by the enthusiastic reaction from the packed-out audience.

He practises what he preaches. Chairman Stephen Stratford said he'd been trying to reach Freeman - via email - to discuss how they were going to shape the session. He never responded.

While Freeman was lighthearted in tone, he related how long hours in the library researching his book, out of internet reach, changed his way of thinking about things.

Time slowed down. He regained an ability to focus.

His research turned up the disturbing fact that people spend more time on their computers than with their spouses.

You don't need 1200 "friends" on Facebook, he says. Add that 50 per cent of emails are misinterpreted because there is no social instinct in the terse language, and yes, he answered a questioner, we are indeed dumbing down.

Earlier in the day, the festival hosted an edifying session with Canterbury University academic Paul Millar, author of No Fretful Sleeper, the biography of New Zealand writer Bill Pearson whose inner life was concealed because he was gay.

It's hard to comprehend now but in those pre-law reform times the consequences of homosexuality were frightening and, in Pearson's case, would have also been deeply humiliating.

Millar, quizzed by host Peter Wells, said Pearson, whom he interviewed extensively before the writer's death in 2002, would have been both pleased and horrified by the book.

Pearson, who cut himself off from his family, became closely associated with the Maori Club at the University of Auckland where according to Millar, he "fell in love" with the young Pita Sharples.

It wasn't reciprocated but they remained great friends.

Another session, which featured Colin McCahon biographer Gordon Brown in conversation with Peter Simpson, fell apart a little under the weight of a confusing slide show and the 82-year-old writer's verbal struggles.

But the audience showed great goodwill towards a pioneer of arts writing.