Since the Inception of the internet, social scientists have engaged in research related to the online communities, cyberspace and cyber-identities. Research in this area has attracted many different perspectives dispersed across multiple interests, whether it is called the ‘digital humanities’, ‘new media studies’, ‘cyberculture studies’. Although ‘cyber’ was the dominant term used in the 1990s and early 2000s, it has been largely replaced by the term ‘digital’ now that the internet has become much more pervasive, moving from desktops to devices that can be worn on the body and transported anywhere, allowing the user to be constantly connected to the internet. ‘Digital studies’ encapsulates the concerns previously addressed by social scientists in the 1990s and extends into this new era of mobile digital usage. It is a neat descriptive term that also encompasses other disciplines and their use of the term ‘digital’. ‘Digital studies’ focus on the way emails, mailing lists, digital forums, blogs, social networks or mobile applications change the way people work and live (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Whether called the network society (Castells, 2009) or the connected revolution (Brown et al., 2002), the fusion of internet and multiple digital devices further expands the influence of these objects in our daily lives. The particular uses of those new devices have been documented so far by economists, historians, sociologists and a growing number of STS scholars are conducting studies about innovators and users of arising online services, relying primarily on ethnography but also extensively on the new data mining and so-called ‘virtual ethnography’ approaches (Beuscart et al., 2016).

中文翻译：

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技术无国界？后殖民世界中的社会数字化

自成立以来在互联网领域，社会科学家从事与在线社区，网络空间和网络身份有关的研究。无论是所谓的“数字人文学科”，“新媒体研究”，“网络文化研究”，这一领域的研究都吸引了多种不同兴趣的观点。尽管“网络”是1990年代和2000年代初期使用的主要术语，但由于互联网已变得越来越普及，从台式机到可以穿戴在身上的设备，“互联网”已被“数字”一词所取代。传输到任何地方，使用户可以持续连接到Internet。“数字研究”涵盖了1990年代社会科学家先前解决的问题，并延伸到了移动数字使用的新时代。这是一个简洁的描述性术语，还包含其他学科及其对“数字”的使用。“数字研究”侧重于电子邮件，邮件列表，数字论坛，博客，社交网络或移动应用程序改变人们工作和生活方式的方式（Rainie＆Wellman，2012）。无论是所谓的网络社会（Castells，2009年）还是互联革命（Brown等，2002年），互联网和多种数字设备的融合都进一步扩大了这些对象在我们日常生活中的影响力。到目前为止，经济学家，历史学家，社会学家已经记录了这些新设备的特殊用途，并且越来越多的STS学者正在研究有关新兴服务和在线服务用户的研究，