Ebook: Linguistic Politeness in Online Communication

Politeness is a big theme in the studies of pragmatics. It has been
discussed for the last seventy years and yet certain depth can still be added
into the body of works. This book is written to connect the classical
theories of politeness and the practical applications of politeness in the
digital age. Today, we are faced with two kinds of interactions due to
technological advancements: face-to-face interaction and cyber interaction.
Both interactions seem to use the same mechanism of semantics and
pragmatics. However, in reality, they have gaps.
With this in mind, I feel the urge to make those gaps explicit. Those
discrepancies between face-to-face and cyber interaction may not be
intuitive. Even in some cases, they are counter-intuitive. We, human beings,
have been utilizing face-to-face interaction for at least forty thousand years,
yet in the last twenty years, cyber communication has been infiltrating our
life. The infiltration started with small and limited application like email
and short messages but now the infiltration has been securing some hours
of our daily communications among human beings. Humans from all ages
plunge in the arena of cyber communication. We may have had the
assumption of face-to-face interaction politeness principles and features
transferred to its cyber counterpart and vice versa. Some of those politeness
principles and features work well in both worlds. Those are human-made
principles and used in the human world anyway. However, it is so often
some principles, which work well in a medium, fail to convert comfortably
in the other medium.