Language and interaction in new-media environments

This chapter reviews key features and principles of language and social interaction as they apply to communication in new media environments. These include turn-taking, identity & face concerns, speech as action, expandability of sequences and activities, methods of coordination and repair, community and culturally bound assumptions about communication, and the emergent and dynamic outcomes of communication's design. The review first attends to how these features and principles of face-to-face (FtF) interaction are evident in mediated communication in the way people adapt language use to the demands of communication and the mediated environment. Second, the review reverses ground to highlight how language use is implicated in technological design and thus how new media are part of a pragmatic web that extends features and principles of language and social interaction for communication across space and time. In this way, information and communication technologies, are important opportunities for insight into the nature of mediated communication. Central to this chapter is the view that technologically-mediated communication can be understood as linguistic and social practices for communication that are adapted to the demands of non-FtF environments.