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This chapter looks at the impact of some of the technological innovations on the communicative practices of professional communities and genres, in the light of the new developments in the age of globalization and the growing expansion of English, from a socioeconomic and sociolinguistic perspective as well as a technological one. The new technological affordances are extremely innovative and have a major impact on the discourse of professional communities, but they also proliferate rapidly and can be generically unstable. The chapter refers to examples drawn from the professional domains examined in the previous chapters (thus medicine, law and education), also with the aim of showing some of their stylistic features. It also looks at the discourse of a number of multimodal texts and blogs in order to examine their stylistic choices and to see how they are affected by the technological innovations and affordances.

This chapter examines the effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on storytelling as a practice of communication among transnational families. It describes three technological affordances that are linked to digital storytelling practices of six Colombian migrant families residing in Montreal, Canada: presence, interactivity, and multimodality. After providing an overview of the methodological approach employed in the research study and the techniques used to collect and analyse the data, the chapter discusses the findings with regard to the views of the participant families about the dynamics of their post-migration storytelling experiences. More specifically, it considers the Colombian families' perspectives about being present during their digital interactions. An important finding is that digital mediation seems to be altering family storytelling. For some families, ICTs catalyse storytelling in situations where presence and multimodality take place; for others, ICTs constrain family storytelling when the illusion of nonmediation is not experienced.

This chapter surveys social media platforms whose policies are examined in this book and gives an overview of critical research on the increasing role of private intermediaries in regulating digital environments (DeNardis, 2014), placing this information against the safe harbor provisions of the CDA and DMCA, which ensure limited liability for online intermediaries. The brief company profiles are meant to provide an overview for those readers who are not familiar with these companies and their history in relationship to bullying incidents. Following Gillespie (2010, 2015) and van Dijck (2013), the chapter examines the literature on discourses of platforms.

In the late 1950s, several European and American composers engaged in the aleatory debates, which ask how chance elements can be incorporated into music. The controversy was most famously visible at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1958, where Cage antagonized Boulez, Stockhausen, and other European composers. This chapter reassesses the who, where, and how of the debates. A series of analyses demonstrate that European composers hardly rejected chance interventions in their electronic and acoustic works. Whereas Cage, Tudor, Brown, and other American experimentalists hewed toward performer-centered indeterminacy, European avant-gardists such as Pousseur, Ligeti, Boulez, and Stockhausen experimented with open and mobile forms and statistical interpolations. In fact, composers debated together how to incorporate chance from a range of inspirations, including literature, linguistic theory, and phonetics. Aleatory experimentation on both sides of the Atlantic was highly conditioned by questions of human and machinic agency, as composers grappled with prodigious performers like Tudor, as well as with the technological limits of the studio machines and the materiality of magnetic tape. Electronic studios in both the United States and Europe were rich sites in which composers negotiated the terms of the aleatory debates.