Twitter drives the national conversation in the theatrum mundi

As newspapers have been reduced in scope, size and distribution, the letters pages too have been reduced in quantity.

Despite the contraction in available media space, highly flammable issues - carbon tax, nuclear energy, gay marriage, and immigration - continue to frame the public consciousness.

The public space for this ordinary form of political argumentation between advocates and opponents has shifted remarkably to Twitter; an instrumental micro-blog that mirrors the brevity and irony of the letters pages, and the anger and face value of the call back radio program with the vital added element of immediacy.

With its 140 character limitation and its openness to all it has surfaced as the natural successor to the letters page and call back radio.

Unlike the letters pages and the radio, however, which were always subjected to the censorship of editors, Twitter is the unbound Prometheus.

It has, as we have seen in the past couple of years, the capacity and capability to fire the imagination and to drive the policy agenda.

US president Barack Obama employed it only a short time ago in an attempt to drive the fiscal agenda in Washington towards resolution of a tax deadlock.

It was used swiftly, if not effectively, to place Iran and its political instability at the top of the trending topics in 2009.

And the London rioters, followed by the cleanup squads, used it for bad and good.

Measurement of the effectiveness of Twitter as an instrument of ordinary political argumentation is similar in scope to measuring the effectiveness of the letters pages.

In 2008 Uli Windisch of the University of Geneva measured successfully the daily political communication and argumentation occurring in letters pages in Switzerland.

While the Swiss case is peculiar for its political system of direct democracy, as Windisch points out, its basic argument can also be applied to Twitter to obtain a better understanding of argumentation.