ABSTRACT
Internet technologies have generated a variety of relatively new textual means of communication, many of which have become an integral part of everyday life for hundreds of millions, and which are challenging the literacy practices of print culture. These new modes include asynchronous, person-to-person, private e-mail and one-to-many postings to Listservs, discussion forums, Usenet, and blogs (weblogs), as well as synchronous text-based chat (e.g. Internet Relay Chat), instant messaging (ICQ, Yahoo! Instant Messenger), and graphical modes incorporating typed asynchronous and synchronous text (Second Life, Active Worlds).1 These new modes of writing have spawned an academic specialty among linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and communication researchers of ‘interactive written discourse’ (Ferrara et al. 1991), ‘electronic language’ (Collot and Belmore 1996), ‘Netspeak’ (Crystal 2006), or, most commonly, computer-mediated communication (CMC).2
