Sprach- und Kommunikationsformen im WorldWideWeb

The paper explores computer-mediated communication, especially new interactive forms of communication, most of them created along with Web 2.0. I briefly focus the challenges of the information and communication technologies for the society and the inequalities in access to them (‹digital divide›), analyze the demogra¬phics of the user-groups and the trends in internet use. After a short intro¬duction to new electronic media like E-Mail, Chat, Blog, News¬groups, Message Boards, Guestbooks and Twitter, the distinction between medial and conceptual orality and literacy on the basis of a model proposed by Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher (1994) is presented. Finally the individual papers published in this volume will be introduced