Civil society has been deemed by various scholars, such as Robert D. Putnam, to be a predictor and a cornerstone of a robust and consolidated democracy (Putnam et al., 1993). Putnam highlights in his book Bowling Alone (2000) that American civil society has become weaker: people organize less, and literally, they bowl alone. But what if there is yet another aspect to Putnam's story that has not been fully accounted for, namely the rise of Digital Civil Society (DCS)? Perhaps people in the third decade of the 21st century bowl online. They still organize, mobilize, and care for their civil liberties and democratic institutions; however, the public sphere in which this takes place has shifted online to cyberspace (Bernholz et al., 2013) or to what still needs to be conceptualized, the digital public sphere (DPS), which this article attempts to measure and demarcate.

翻译：公民社会被罗伯特·D·帕特南等学者视为稳健且巩固的民主制度的预测指标与基石（Putnam et al., 1993）。帕特南在其著作《独自打保龄》（2000）中指出，美国公民社会已趋于衰弱：人们的组织活动减少，字面意义上正“独自打保龄”。然而，若帕特南的论述中尚有一个未获充分考量的维度——即数字公民社会（DCS）的兴起——又将如何？或许在21世纪的第三个十年，人们已在线上进行“打保龄”活动。他们仍在组织、动员并关切自身的公民自由与民主制度；然而，此类活动发生的公共领域已转移至网络空间（Bernholz et al., 2013），或转向仍需概念化的数字公共领域（DPS）——本文正试图对这一领域进行度量与界定。