Something I No Longer Believe: Is Internet Time Slowing Down?

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.