Language and New Media Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions

The public's increasing engagement in Internet communication has generated new academic interest in the effects of technological mediation on language change. The interest has resulted in an expansion of theoretical reflection on language change within a mediated communication reality, a new focus of linguistic research, and specialized forms of historical linguistics. This qualitative and quantitative historical media linguistics volume is focused on the description of multimodal change, stylistic variation, and the transformation of cultural practices and norms, beyond traditional written and oral texts to digital electronic texts of varying types. To address these topics, this volume brings together researchers analyzing a wide variety of communication media - blogs, email, fax, IRC, chat, IM, text messaging (SMS), loveletters, post- and e-cards, telephone, radio, television, and website literacies such as homepage texts, Wikipedia entries and website hypertextuality. The result is a volume that investigates the emergence of newer media, language change in the new media context, and issues related to the connection between newer media and older media. Thus, it offers a unique perspective on the theme of linguistic and cultural change in the context of technological evolutions.