From groups to actions and back in online-offline sociolinguistics

The papers in this volume all articulate a keen awareness of the shift
in sociolinguistic economies caused by online technologies. We now live in an
online-offline nexus of communication, and realizing this invites changes in
the ways in which we traditionally view and imagine the foundations of our
disciplinary approaches. In reviewing the papers, I focus on two important
aspects of such revisionist enterprises. One is the emergence of an analytical
triad of infrastructures, actions and moralizations, evidence of which is offered
in the different papers. The second aspect is of a more general nature: we can
suggest, on the basis of the evidence presented in this volume, to reverse
the general heuristic of research from groups-individuals-language towards
interaction-individuals-groups. This reversal of direction would equip our disciplines with an extraordinarily powerful theory of social action.