Globalization and the Internet have greatly diversified the opportunities for intercultural contact, and this contact is very often mediated by writing. This paper frames literacy as sets of cognitive, social, and cultural practices that interact with material technologies of writing. Four issues related to the role of literacy and technology in French language learning are reviewed and illustrated with data: new online language forms, language play, online intercultural communication, and multimodal communication. Suggesting that the new cultures of reading and writing in electronic environments are increasingly characterized by multiple, dynamic norms, the paper concludes with a discussion of implications for research in second/foreign language acquisition.