GIVE ME A BREAK:JUST AS Darina Allen started the slow food movement, which encourages people to think about what they're eating, buy fresh food and take time preparing and enjoying it with family and friends, I have a movement of my own to start: the slow communication movement, writes KATE HOLMQUIST

Instead of texting and e-mailing, we would return to real-time conversation – a bit like braising an organic chicken rather than eating chicken nuggets. We would stop twittering and blogging and meet real people in real life – like picking lettuce fresh from the garden rather than buying a bag of leaves harbouring bacteria. We’d bake bread, instead of reading websites with recipes about mouthwatering treats that we’ll never bake. We’d keep personal diaries, rather than letting it all hang out on Facebook. We’d write letters. On paper. With fountain pens. We’d learn to lick stamps again.

Sounds nuts, doesn’t it? When I tell my children about the olden days before mobile phones, when we were totally out of touch with our parents who worried only when we didn’t get home within half-an-hour of when we said we would, they have difficulty conceiving of it. Yet every time I overhear somebody on a mobile phone say, “I’m on the Dart. At Seapoint. I’m with so-and-so”, I can’t help thinking that a little more independence has been lost to Big Brother, or Big Mother, Big Father, Big Employer – the person pulling the strings who wants us to have no downtime at all.

We have become puppets with our strings pulled by whomever is on the other end of a remote conversation – whether it’s a mobile phone, an e-mail contact or a Facebook friend. The need to remain in touch is a constant adrenalin rush, yet with every exchange, we become less real. Communicating only through text or e-mail is dehumanising. You can be crueller, more abrupt or the opposite – falsely, fantastically kind. You can be someone you’re not.

Many isolated people – 90 per cent of us, probably – enjoy contact with people of like mind via the web, which can be a lifeline, yet internet and mobile phone relationships are rarely spiritually nutritious and we can’t expect to survive on them, just as we can’t expect to survive on fast food and stay healthy.

I met a couple the other night who have lived all over the world and been successful in their entrepreneurship, but what they really missed was being with their families in real time in a real place, so the took the risk of returning to Ireland to live – not at an optimal time, they admit. But they’re still glad they came back because they can physically be with the people they love.

When you live far away from your family and the people you grew up with, you can try to keep in touch via skype and so on, but it’s just not the same, however much we may wish it so. I live in the real world, so please don’t call me a Luddite. Yet my inner Luddite emerges when I lose my mobile phone or run out of credit or fail to check my voice messages because something inside is rebelling against being instantly available. People I’ve never met send e-mails and want answers immediately, then clog up my phone message queue when I haven’t responded within 24 hours. Whatever happened to the carefully crafted letter and the ease of a few weeks’ time to respond? What sort of a family Sunday is it when everyone is connected to their own communications device, having conversations with people that no one else in the family has ever met?

Just as Darina Allen wants to be a grandmother teaching her grandchildren to cook and sew, I want to be real in real time with real people. But it’s becoming more difficult day by day. There are people I haven’t seen in 30 years with whom I have internet friendships; I’m not sure which of us are the ghosts of times past – them or I.

Cyberspace makes relationships cheap, and the prospect of dealing with real people in real time ever more frightening. No wonder people flirt and love and reject one another by text message and e-mail while being overheard on public transportation. Are relationships too much trouble? Without the reality of slow communication as it was before, we have no time to consider or relish or enjoy or even commit.

We all want an answer and we want it now, when our human hearts need more. Unintentionally heartless, that’s what so many of us have become in our digital, internet, cyberspace need-it-now worlds. Whenever I get an abusive e-mail from a reader, I immediately forgive because I know that they don’t see me as real feeling person. Likewise, my lack of time to answer about a thousand e-mails a week in less than two sentences makes me abrupt. But that’s the world we’ve made, isn’t it?