Twitter, politics and the Lonely Planet effect

Twitter is good.
Following political events in real time on Twitter is better.
Following the Liberal party tear itself apart then stitch itself back together with key orifices switched around on Twitter is the best.

The last week or so has been a hoot and I've been glued to all the #spill action. As has been discussed elsewhere, this was the first major Australian political event to get a serious thrashing on Twitter. It was the perfect medium for getting the little details of the rapidly moving events out to a receptive audience and the press gallery journalists providing the info should be commended.

Much has been made of the 'conversation' between politcians, journalists and the public that twitter allows. Indeed, I will never wash my twitter feed again after I 'interacted' with none other than Annabell Crabb, the darling of political nerds everywhere. Sure she was just answering a stupid question that I could have found the answer to on the ABC website, but none the less it was an interaction that isn't really possibly in other forms of media.

So this is all great, but let's keep this in perspective. The only reason that a conversation between journalists and their twitter followers is possible is because there are so few of them. Even the most popular have only a few thousand followers, many of whom are probably inactive much of the time. I followed the #spill feed all week and in my view there was a solid core of at most a few hundred people, probably less, that were taking part in the conversation. For those of us involved it was fantastic, but it's still a small number.

But here's the rub, in order for twitter to retain its awesomeness in political coverage, it has to stay small. If you look at the #spill feed now it's nothing like the exciting conversation that all the cool kids where having when these recent events began. In the good old days (a week ago) there was plenty of great insight from the punters and the gallery and plenty of good conversations and humour. As the events drew to a climax, more people started tweeting on #spill, you couldn't follow it, there were no genuine conversations and the quality dropped substantially. Once the topic trended high enough, the spambots moved in as well. Quite simply, politics on twitter is like a secret little beach on an island somewhere, known only to a select few. As soon as you put it in a travel guide, the masses arrive and through no fault of any individual, the place is ruined, because there is just too many people.

I'm probably overstating the case a little, but the point is that twitter cannot be both interactive and influential, it can only be one or the other at any given moment. That's not a problem though, judging by the #spill feed 99.9% of those involved were not Liberal voters to start with, and in all likelyhood most of the people we may talk to about what we learned on twitter are not Liberal voters either. For all the great insight twitter broadcast, I doubt that even a single persons political views were changed by it.

Let's celebrate twitter's addition to politics for what it is: a great new way for a very small niche audience to meet and exchange ideas and information.