117 Send : Act : Perform ROSEMARY KLICH PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18·5 : pp.117-123 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.828935 More opening entrances, more initial encounters and more irst impressions are now made by email, and impression management has always mattered, to both presenter and receptive audience. The importance and the frequency of email presentation has now created a particular kind of performance anxiety, an anxiety comprising possible mis-communication, mis- representation, missed or mixed messages, or the perhaps accidental but inexcusably irreversible premature ‘send’. Variations of punctuation, inappropriate conversational style, spelling errors, misplaced humour, dubious tone, and temporary emotion made electronically permanent, may signiicantly inluence the reader’s perceptions of the writer, let alone the intended meaning. In their book Send: The How, Why, When, and When Not, of Email (2007), David Shipley and Will Schwalbe narrate a horror story of emails miswritten, mis-sent, mis-understood, and made public when they were intended for private consumption. They describe email as the most dificult written medium to manage, and warn that ‘a message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his [or her] own fears, prejudices, and anxieties’ (Shipley and Schwalbe 2007: 7). An awareness of this potential for misunderstanding creates unease: ‘We are in the position of having to get our messages right dozens or even hundreds of times a day, often under intense pressure, and for recipients whose needs, attitudes and moods are constantly changing’ (8). ‘Urban dictionaries’ and online social forums now recognize ‘send anxiety’ as involving panic or fear caused by the need to send an email to a large audience that may include senior work colleagues or over the possibility of forgetting to attach a document or over the possibility of there being grammatical errors in the email: ‘Even after the email content has been triple- checked for accuracy, the attachment has been veriied (attached), and the recipient list is correct, one may feel panic or fear (anxiety) before sending, causing delays to click “send”’ (Pheonix, www.urbandictionary.com, 2006). This kind of anxiety may be considered a form of stage fright; Esther Milne describes how the theatricality of email creates apprehension: In their one-to-one communications, the subjects of epistolary discourse engage in what we might call a dialogic performance, whereas for their email counterparts the one-to-many performance is more properly described as theatrical. The latter is, arguably, more dificult to regulate, since communication involves the participation of multiple subjects. Although, of course, misunderstanding and misrepresentation are possible in epistolary communication, in email discussion groups this possibility is ampliied. Subjects must negotiate not only the portrayal of self but also the audience response to this portrayal and, subsequently, their own response to the audience’s reaction. (Milne 2010: 197) The act of sending an email stages both the text and the sender, exposing them to potentially limitless audience numbers. Whether deliberately sending an email to a large group or sending a message to an individual with the intention and expectation of it being kept private by him or her, emails are written with an awareness of the writing as performance. (Without this awareness the potential for embarrassment increases, and it is this awareness that produces performance anxiety.) Milne describes how when writing to ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online © 2013 TAYLOR & FRANCIS