Cybersign and new proximities: Impacts of new communication technologies on space and language

New communication technologies have created new contexts for social interaction and new challenges for understanding the role of technology in human activity, particularly in altering spatial relationships of interaction. In this article we discuss ways a new communication technology is influencing social interaction and language use among a visual language community, the Deaf community, in the U.S. We show some examples of ways signers are inventing new communication behaviors and adapting others as a result of the technological mediation of their visual space. Signers exploit new properties of the technologically mediated visual field, such as the way the size of manual signs is affected by proximity to the webcamera lens, and they respond to how other properties of the visual field require the adaptation of sign language production.