https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305119849492
By David Karpf
Abstract
Back in 2012, I wrote an article speculating on the implications of Moore’s Law and “Internet Time” for political communication researchers (Karpf, 2012). The premise was that the Internet continues to change at such a rapid pace that it creates fundamental ceteris paribus problems for digital politics research. I still believe that is a fair assessment of the Internet of the early 2000s. But I no longer believe it holds true for the Internet today. I have come to believe that the pace of digital innovation is slowing down and that the suite of user-facing technologies that make up the mass-oriented Internet has stabilized. This article elaborates on what has led me to rethink the status of Internet Time and discusses the implications of this temporal slowdown. It draws on archival research from a study of WIRED magazine over its 25-year history. (((!)))
Introduction
A 2012 article of mine pondered the pace of digital change online—“Internet Time”:
The Internet of 2012 is different from the Internet of 2002. What is more, there is little reason to suppose this rapid evolution is finished: The Internet of 2022 will likely be different from the Internet of 2012.
My central argument was that the Internet is unique among Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) because it keeps changing even as it is adopted by larger segments of the public. This in turn wreaks methodological havoc on some of our most robust research techniques by violating key ceteris paribus assumptions. The pace of Internet Time seemed unlikely to slow in the foreseeable future.
I now wish to reevaluate that final point. I remain convinced that studying Internet-mediated politics is especially tricky because the medium has been rapidly and repeatedly reconfigured over the years. But the Internet seems to be stabilizing, and the pace of change seems to be slowing down.
Consider: Today, we are much closer to the Internet of 2022 than we are to the Internet of 2012. The Internet of 2012 (at least as it was experienced in the United States) was defined by a few iconic companies—Google (and YouTube), Apple (and the iPhone), Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter in particular. Several of those companies had not existed a decade earlier. Today, the Internet is still defined by those same iconic companies (at least in the United States and most of the Global North). Facebook in 2019 is different from Facebook in 2012, but this is a smaller change than we had grown accustomed to. The Internet of 2019 is a lot more like the Internet of 2012 than I had predicted.
While undergoing a larger archival project on the history of the digital future, this emerged as my most surprising observation. Moore’s Law and Internet Time are bedrock elements in the mythos of Silicon Valley and the digital age (Markoff, 2005). In the 1990s and early 2000s, one can observe the concrete impacts of Internet Time within the historical record. But the pace of technological breakthroughs palpably slows in the 2010s. This article will provide evidence of the slowdown and offer some commentary on what it implies.
The WIRED Study
In the summer of 2018, I conducted a study of WIRED magazine. I read the entire magazine chronologically, treating it as a historical text that documents how some of the most buoyant promoters of the “digital revolution” viewed it contemporaneously. In effect, I was looking to construct a history of the digital future (Karpf, 2018). Several previous scholars have used WIRED as a source for studying the discourse of the digerati (Flichy, 2007; Mosco, 2004; Streeter, 2005; Turner, 2006), but their attention has been fixed on the magazine’s early years. To my knowledge, I am the first academic to take the excessive step of reading the entire back catalog cover-to-cover. (((!!))) (The magazine described me as an “obsessed academic.” I have decided this was a compliment.)...
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