Today, computer-mediated communication spans a range of activities from interactive messages to word processing. Researchers interested in this new technology have concentrated on its effects in the workplace for knowledge production and dissemination or on its word processing function. The study reported here examines communication events in which the computer is the medium and views such computer-mediated communication from the perspective of language use. Its goal is to understand, through data collected from an anthropological perspective, the ways of communicating used by members of an...

Provides a wide-ranging survey of the sociolinguistic issues raised by the impact of information technology. The author demonstrates how and in which ways the new technologies both affect human communication and are in turn affected by the way people communicate using the technologies.