ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the superdiversity perspective suggested in recent critical sociolinguistics provides the study of social media discourse and communication with a useful approach to conceptualizing and empirically investigating complex and multiple axes of diversity and difference in social media practices. It discusses recent work in sociolinguistics of social media, highlighting how social media practices illustrate many of the aspects of contemporary social life and communication that are considered symptomatic of superdiversity. It shows how research in this field has moved from viewing superdiversity as a quality or quantity characterizing specific places, spaces, groups and networks to seeing superdiversity as unpredictability, complexity, heterogeneity and mobility of semiotic resources and normativities in play in communicative practices, identity work and discourses. Finally, it discusses two key challenges for future work in this area: the role of social media communication in surveillance and securitization, and in new forms of labour and entrepreneurship.
