Digital communication has transformed the ways people express respect, solidarity, disagreement, intimacy, identity, and social belonging. In online spaces, politeness and impoliteness are no longer limited to conventional face-to-face interaction, formal speech, or established etiquette. They are increasingly performed through platform-specific practices such as emojis, likes, reactions, hashtags, memes, tagging, reposting, silence, response timing, and visual design.
This edited volume, Multidimensional Approaches to Ritualized (Im)Politeness in Digital Discourse, examines how politeness and impoliteness are ritualized, negotiated, challenged, and transformed in digital environments. It approaches politeness not simply as the use of polite expressions but as a socially meaningful practice connected to relational work, identity construction, moral evaluation, social alignment, and community norms.
The book invites contributions that explore how ritualized forms of politeness and impoliteness emerge across diverse digital contexts, including social media, messaging apps, online classrooms, religious livestreams, political communication channels, family group chats, gaming communities, forums, and AI-mediated interactions. It particularly welcomes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives that examine how traditional politeness practices such as greetings, apologies, thanks, honorifics, indirectness, address forms, advice, blessings, ritual insults, and formulaic expressions are reshaped in online communication.
By bringing together insights from pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, digital communication, religious studies, gender studies, education, anthropology, intercultural communication, and related fields, this volume seeks to offer a timely and comprehensive account of ritualized (im)politeness in the digital age.