Since the 1990s, political theorists studied the impact of digital media on the public sphere. These debates extensively employ Arendt’s theory of the public sphere to evaluate whether social media meets the expectations and criteria set forth in her account. This common approach rests on a methodological assumption that is itself not critically examined: it asserts that one should start with a clear understanding of what political action ‘truly’ is and only then attend to its potential relation with technology. However, this article identifies two issues with this approach: it overlooks the complex interplay between technology and political action, and struggles to adapt Arendt’s pre-digital era theory to digital environments. Nonetheless, I argue that Arendt’s phenomenological methodology (i.e., how she develops her political theory) does offer an effective starting point to explore the changing relationship between politics and technology in the contemporary public sphere. This approach begins with an exploration of the technological conditions shaping political action rather than with a pre-established notion of political action. I demonstrate how this methodological blueprint can be expanded with a postphenomenological framework to bring Arendt’s political theory into the digital age, revealing how digital technologies continuously re-stabilize the intentional structure of political action.

自 20 世纪 90 年代以来，政治理论家研究了数字媒体对公共领域的影响。这些辩论广泛运用阿伦特的公共领域理论来评估社交媒体是否符合她在书中提出的期望和标准。这种常见的方法基于一种方法论假设，而该假设本身并没有经过严格的检验：它主张人们应该首先清楚地理解政治行动“真正”是什么，然后才关注其与技术的潜在关系。然而，本文指出了这种方法的两个问题：它忽视了技术与政治行动之间复杂的相互作用，并且努力使阿伦特的前数字时代理论适应数字环境。尽管如此，我认为阿伦特的现象学方法论（即她如何发展她的政治理论）确实为探索当代公共领域中政治与技术之间不断变化的关系提供了一个有效的起点。这种方法始于对塑造政治行动的技术条件的探索，而不是从预先建立的政治行动概念开始。我将展示如何通过后现象学框架扩展这一方法论蓝图，将阿伦特的政治理论带入数字时代，揭示数字技术如何不断地重新稳定政治行动的意向结构。