WRITING ONLINE

The need for permanent connectivity and the growing pressure for quick task completion in today's organizations has lead to the spread of a wide range of technologically mediated online communications tools. E-mail is already a commonplace in the white-collar workplace, but other tools, such as text-based real-time messaging (instant messaging or IM), online conferencing, knowledge depositories, shared online workplaces and wikis are also on their way to become ubiquitous. Owing to these developing new technologies and the resulting range of new communicative modes, as well as to the relative ease of accessing them, virtual work has become extremely popular in the last decade. Although there is a wide range of online audio-visual channels available for virtual professional communication, text-based communicative tools - e-mail and IM - have still been found to be the most preferred methods - particularly for internal communication. In spite of this preference, however, the role these technologies play in the communication of a workplace and their impact on interpersonal business discourse conventions are still a relatively under- explored. This volume intends to fill this void by exploring the language of text-based computer-mediated communicative genres: IM and e-mail. The book takes an essentially language and discourse-centered perspective, and by drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks from language-oriented studies, it provides an overview of the complexities of text- based online professional communication.