This article draws an analogy between physical nonverbal gesture and the textual conventions of new and social media to argue that the vital nonverbal functions of face-to-face communication are not absent from digital media, but that communicative functions typically enacted nonverbally are transposed into new spaces of interaction afforded by synchronous and near-synchronous textual media. Digital and social media text is conversational text that fulfills the phatic needs of typical social interaction: ‘keeping in touch’ does not in any way constitute a cultural regression but represents the fundamental ground of human cognition, which is inescapably both social and technologically dependent. An analysis of examples from the popular microblogging service Twitter serves to illustrate the gestural functions of digital media text, including the enactment of mediated social ‘spaces’. The closing section explores the theoretical implications for identity and agency of connecting embodied nonverbal communication to digital media communication that is all too often erroneously understood to be or implicitly approached as ‘disembodied’.
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