ABSTRACT
New mediating technologies are always associated with the altered conditions of actualization of communication processes. They relate not only to the semantic level of the production of meaning or changes in communally held expectations about the course of communication, but even to fundamental assumptions without which communication could not happen at all. These assumptions include the mutual perception by participants of communication and their co-orienting activities. Here as well, structuring, irritating or disturbing effects result from the use of technologies of communication. Even though the development of modern technologies increasingly takes these problems into account in a better way, the description and analysis of this nexus of problems is extraordinarily instructive for attempts made to comprehend inter-human communication. This is because the constitutive conditions and the general functional and structural characteristics of the communication process are thereby demonstrated. Even though the focus of research has in part shifted from analyses limited to language to multimodal analyses of interaction, there remains a need to explain how the numerous levels instrumentalized by the participants, in order to dictate their behavior and actions, work together in the interests of the coordination of action and communicative comprehension.
