14. On the Use of Hypermediality in Teaching Culture in German as a Foreign Language Context

Since the development of the World Wide Web in 1989 by Sir Tim Bernes-Lee and the Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau at the CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, people's lives have taken an increasing digital turn; certain age groups being especially Internet-savvy, and almost constantly online.As a result, it has become a part of our everyday life to constantly take pictures or make films and simultaneously share them via digital media, whether locally or remotely.This increasing digitalization of communication, therefore, not only dissolves the limitations of local and remote communication, but also leads to interpersonal interactions, which are mediaassisted on a regular basis, thus compelling teachers to bring the digital media in face-to-face classroom sessions.The permanent availability and versatility of digital media (the Internet, CDs/ DVDs, interactive kiosks, mobile devices), provide, on one hand, new directions for scientific development, and on the other hand, offer scholars a source of new research topics and approaches.For Pisani, Radtke and Wolters (2014: 226), digital media share three common features: hypermediality, interactivity, and multimediality.Alongside computer science, these characteristics have become keywords in the research in the fields of communication, translation, education, etc. From the perspective of translation studies, Sandrini (2011: 235) points out that 'this development should not be seen as a mere change in media, but […] [must] be analysed holistically, with all its implications at the level of text production and organisation, multilingualism, technical requirements and many further areas of investigation'.The newness of the field is also demonstrated by the fact that, regardless of discipline, scholarly discourse, whether linguistics-or pedagogy-oriented, always begins by explaining the origin of the concept of hypertext (e.g.,