A B S T R A C TAccording to some discussions concerning new information technologies and technologically enhanced communication, we are now in a revolution as profound as the printing press. The Internet is creating new kinds of meetingplaces and work areas and the possibilities of new types of relationships across time and space. This article reports on some ways that the Internet is shaping language practices in the Deaf community, with an interest in how new tools mediate and influence human behavior, including language and the organization of interaction. This includes the development and manipulation of a computer-mediated image of self and other, creativity and problemsolving in new communicative spaces, creating reciprocal perspectives, new participation frameworks, and specifics of language change. For the first time, deaf people can communicate using manual visual language, in many cases their native language, across space and time zones. This groundbreaking situation makes the Deaf community a particularly productive site for research into relationships between technological innovations and new communicative practices. (American Sign Language, computer-mediated communication, language and technology, Deaf.)* I N T R O D U C T I O NAccording to some discussions concerning new information technologies and technologically enhanced communication, we are now in a revolution as profound as that initiated by the printing press (Poster 1984). The Internet is creating new kinds of meetingplaces and work areas and the possibilities of new types of relationships across time and space. New socio-technical relations involve linking the local and the nonlocal in intimate, relational, and reciprocal connections, and offer new forms of access to others, with new space-transcending capacities and new techno-cultural visions (Robins & Webster 1999:221). Relationships can even involve a "tactile" dimension (Mitchell 1995). The new arenas for so-

A B S T R A C TThe development of digital communication technologies not only has an influence on human communicative practices, but also creates new spaces for human collaborative activity. In this article we discuss a technologically mediated context for interaction, computer games. Closely looking at interactions among a group of gamers, we examine how players are managing complex, shifting frameworks of participation, the virtual game world and the embodied world of talk and plans for action. Introducing the notion of PARTICIPATION CUES, we explain how interactants are able to orient to, plan, and execute collaborative actions that span quite different environments with quite different types of agency, possible acts, and consequences. Novel abilities to interact across diverse spaces have consequences for understanding how humans build coordinated action through efficient, multimodal communication mechanisms. (Computer-mediated communication, language and technology, gaming, gesture, participation, multimodality)* I N T R O D U C T I O NThe recent rapid development of digital communication technologies has resulted in new spaces for collaborative activity. In new technologically mediated spaces, people are adapting communicative practices and in some cases inventing new ones. In this article we discuss a technologically mediated context for interaction, a "LAN (local area network) party" or temporary gathering of people who network their computers together to play multiplayer computer games. We analyze ways a group of players manage complex, shifting frameworks of

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