Twitter drives the national conversation in the theatrum mundi

"Twitter is on fire this morning. Some fantastic articles coming through" - @jboyded

The Prime Minister Julia Gillard says we need (sometime in the future) to have national conversations about the big issues – carbon tax, immigration, mining, etc.

She misses the point. The conversations are already ignited and fired up.

Like the conversations about rioting and cleaning up in London that are happening in the Twitterverse.

Twitter has replaced the letters pages and call back radio because it's without intervention – no seven second delay, no sub-editor cutting your best par.

Citizens can participate in the 'national conversation' without going out in the rain and without being subjected to the rants of the professional political classes.

A democracy is a democracy when it is subject to the ongoing rigorous participation of its citizens.

For most of the 20th century newspaper pages devoted to letters submitted by ordinary citizens played a vital role in the democratic process.

Citizens were eligible to write about anything and everything – namely issues to which they felt some emotional or rational attachment.

(It was less so in earlier centuries when the literacy rates in the western world were themselves the issue.)

If the issue happened to coincide with the agenda-setting focus of the newspaper itself, so much the better, it had a greater chance of being published.

The letters to the editor pages was an instrument that provided an insight into ordinary political argumentation – letters pages offered perspectives on hot button issues that sidestepped the rhetoric of the elected representative and the political party.