WP340 Jan Blommaert’s sociolinguistics of digital culture

This paper reviews and reflects upon Jan Blommaert’s Durkheim and the Internet (2018) and Online with Garfinkel (2019) as foundational texts for developing what he termed “a sociolinguistics of digital culture.” While sociolinguistic studies of digital communication have offered important insights into practices such as identity displays, multimodal creativity, and online metapragmatics, they have often addressed these features in isolation. Blommaert’s work provides the conceptual grounding for a more integrated framework capable of examining postdigital communication across the online–offline nexus. Drawing on Durkheim and the Internet, we outline Blommaert’s theoretical and methodological propositions—ranging from the indexical-polynomic theory of social norms to concepts such as microhegemonies, light social groups, and polycentric integration—and illustrate their application through empirical case studies in Online with Garfinkel. We further discuss Blommaert’s qualification of Garfinkel’s ideas, emphasizing the need to account for the historically conditioned resources that enable situated action. We conclude that Blommaert’s “light” theoretical propositions offer a productive point of departure for a sociolinguistics of digital culture that integrates attention to historically sedimented ideologies with the contingencies of interaction, thus bridging sociolinguistic and ethnomethodological insights into the organization of contemporary communicative life.