Linguistic Politeness in Online Communication

Book excerpt: 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.