ABSTRACT This article confronts some of the difficulties that temporality poses for the study of digital politics. Where previous articles have discussed the unique methodological challenges for digital politics research – centrally, that we face ceteris paribus problems when attempting to study how people use a medium that is itself still being developed – this article addresses the underlying subject of temporality itself. It offers two distinct provocations. First, it discusses what we are ignoring when we discuss Internet politics in terms of an overarching “digital age” or “digital era.” Conceptualizing a uniform digital age in contraposition to previous media regimes is an easy heuristic crutch, but it comes at the cost of rendering key features of the sociotechnical system invisible. Second, the article distinguishes temporal rhythm from the more common concepts of linear and cyclical time. Particularly in the areas of contentious politics and media politics – areas that are central to the topics covered in this special issue – some of the core changes in institutional processes can be understood as a breakdown of routinized temporal processes. The article then offers suggestions for how digital politics scholars can better incorporate temporal concepts into our research.

中文翻译：

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及时进行数字政治研究的两个挑衅

摘要本文面临时间性对数字政治研究造成的一些困难。先前的文章讨论了数字政治研究所面临的独特方法论挑战-集中地，当我们试图研究人们如何使用仍在发展的媒体时，我们面临着其他方面的挑战-本文解决了时间性本身的潜在主题。它提供了两个明显的挑衅。首先，它讨论了在讨论总体“数字时代”或“数字时代”的互联网政治时我们忽略的内容。与以前的媒体体制相对立的概念是统一的数字时代，这很容易被启发，但是这是以使社会技术系统的关键特征不可见为代价的。第二，本文将时间节律与线性和循环时间的更常见概念区分开。特别是在有争议的政治和媒体政治领域（这是本期特刊所涉及的主题的核心领域），制度过程的某些核心变化可以理解为常规时间过程的分解。然后，本文为数字政治学者如何更好地将时态概念纳入我们的研究提供了建议。