Mediating Technologies and Second Language Learning

Across the variegated history of human social organization, information and communication technologies have proven to have complex effects on the processes they mediate. Some technologies have scaled up familiar activities in the areas of impact, breadth, or speed, while others have given rise to genuinely unique informational, communicative, and social practices (see Marvin, 1990). In the current era, global networks enable memes (in the sense of Dawkins, 1976) of art, music, image, and of course language to propagate, cross-pollinate, mutate, and refract across media and communicative modalities. Massive sociological analyses have documented that the Internet has qualitatively transformed everyday communication and information practices in commercial, financial, professional, educational, recreational, and interpersonal realms (e.g., Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004). All of these issues raise questions as to how educators and researchers should orient themselves to the changing contexts and conditions of additional language learning. While Internet access remains unequally distributed across social classes and geopolitical regions (see Van Dijk, 2005; Warschauer, 2003), user populations continue to expand around the world as life becomes increasingly mediated by established and emerging genres of Internet-mediated communicative activity, many of which vary substantially from predigital epistolary conventions (e.g., Crystal, 2001; Herring, 1996; Thorne & Payne, 2005; Werry, 1996). Of course, at this point in history, more than a decade beyond the widespread