Digital business etiquette: the influence of Internet communication

Business communication has significantly expanded its arsenal of tools and begun to embrace technologies that were previously platforms for private informal communication: social networks and messengers. The relevance and novelty of our research are due to the fact that contemporary digital etiquette in business correspondence, not yet subjected to linguistic analysis, requires not only description and codification but also analysis of the transformations that influence changes in the communicative behavior of participants in business internet communication. The aim of the research is to analyze the elements of informal internet communication inherent in messengers and their influence on modern digital business correspondence. The hypothesis is that the shift of business communication to messengers leads to an increasingly oral-like nature of written business internet communication: it becomes more dynamic, more dialogical, and the norms of business communication are transformed, becoming less rigid. The main research method is a sociolinguistic survey in the form of an internet questionnaire. The research material includes data from mass internet surveys conducted from 2017 to 2024 in O.V. Lukinova’s “Digital Etiquette” Telegram channel. Internet memes were sporadically used to illustrate and confirm assessments in the linguistic reflection of internet users. The authors conclude that business communication in messengers is simultaneously influenced by several factors: business epistolary tradition, email etiquette, and patterns of informal communication that were originally inherent in messengers. Under the influence of the latter, the role of politeness formulas changes in digital business correspondence, a balance between the synchronicity and asynchronicity of communication is sought, the role of graphical symbols changes, and the oral-written nature of internet communication is reconsidered. The research perspective is a comparative analysis of certain etiquette formulas, elements, and details of traditional and electronic business correspondence.