Medien, Kommunikationsformen, kommunikative Gattungen

The aim of this paper is to draw the necessary terminological distinction between media, communication forms and communication genres, and to use this distinction to compare specific communication genres belonging to chat communication. After some preliminary remarks, the following two sections deal with the definition of media and communication forms and the most important characteristics of communication forms, which are illustrated with examples of chat communication. Section 4 introduces the concept of communication genre, and section 5 shows the way communication genres, especially the expert chat and the information chat, can be analyzed within this framework and why it is not possible to do it in the same way with emails and short text messages. In this context the distinction between communication genres and text genres will also be discussed.