The present study course is intended to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the nature of language in the digital era. Within the framework of the given study course new media technologies including instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing are considered for multimodal information encoding and transfer both monolingually and multilingually. The role of the communicative context is emphasized, as well as its types (journalism, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate, etc.), participants of the communicative act (professional and lay, young people and adults, individuals, and groups) and languages of communication are considered. The study course covers a range of topics including genre, style, stance, language ideology, and multimodality. Hands-on practical work with texts in the digital environment constitutes an important part of the study course.