Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

With some exceptions, such as Laura Tingle on Lateline tonight (and, for that matter, Annabel Crabb the other night), the legacy media has intoned very predictable scripts (and as I’ve emphasised, forgotten an alternative one – “strong leader stands up to party dinosaurs and appeals over their heads to public” – which Malcolm Turnbull has been busily reinscribing).

Even in alternative media, such as Crikey, we’ve seen Bernard Keane (aside from his strange obsession with talking up virtues few others can see in Andrew Robb) swing from the standard “dead man walking” talk to “Turnbull is actually going to fight!”… why the latter was a surprise, I have no idea. I’d been suggesting some days earlier it was characteristic of his persona, and also politically rational. Yet the commentariat in their massed battalions seemed to anticipate his folding in the face of the Minchin putsch.

As Andrew Elder asked, could this be the week the journosphere failed?

Let’s not forget Turnbull may win on Tuesday.

What, then, of the frenzied expression of common press gallery wisdom?

Will the shorter Peter Van Onselen still be “Hockey can unify the party because he’s Minchin’s sock puppet”?

Perhaps the only “high level sources” they talk to are the ones who have an agenda. Like I said recently, it’s a bit like Imre Salusinszky having his fill of Chinese lunches at various eateries in and around Sussex Street and then retailing the latest goss on who’s going to overthrow Nathan Rees, only to find that Nathan Rees overthrew his detractors, and no journo saw it coming. Perhaps because something actually happened, as opposed to the endless non-event of leadership talk.

Sometimes politics doesn’t play to script.

Turning to Twitter, as Worst of Perth commented here, it’s been very interesting indeed. For anyone assiduously following this thing, it really has been the best real time news source, and quite amusing and fun too. It’s very well suited to these sorts of fast moving events, and the degree of inaccuracy and rumour is precisely the same as what makes it into the press and the telly. Not least because a fair bit of it is Sky News as it happens…

Interesting also to me has been the fact that a lot of the journos in Canberra who’ve been of greatest value are ones whose bylines are not well known. Maybe they’re working a bit harder than the tv stars and ubiquitous commentators?

On the other hand, as I’ve already alluded to, seasoned, intelligent and insightful commentators such as Laura Tingle prepared to buck the herd, whose work in the Fin Review is only available to those who spend 3 bucks on the paper, and who gets less air time than the show ponies, have shown their worth – as on Lateline tonight.

But, let’s get all this in perspective.

It’s also significant that while #spill is now the most popular tag on Australian Twitter, the fifth is #xmedialab – which is a discussion about a cross media conference that is on in Sydney at the moment. This medium doesn’t have much of a reach, and it has less of a reach than blogs, and slower moving media generally. And that may be because a lot of people are simply not interested in the scoop of the second (83 new tweets since you started searching).

At the same time, the core audience of political junkies, if Twitter is any indication, haven’t been clicking through to MSM stories at all. As Stephen Feneley commented at #spill, journos tweeting is a double edged sword.

That’ll be related to a shift where those who are most engaged around issues are finding their own spaces to interact, often private – lots of the old core of the web is shrinking as people highly attuned to particular communities of interest resort to discussing their own take on stories on social media sites such as Facebook without even looking at actual media reports, preferring to rely on others’ quick summaries of links through social distribution. Whether or not this becomes a wider trend is, at this stage, moot, but something is underway. But it replicates ancient social and cultural patterns – talking about stuff you’ve heard, which is different from silent reading, or even a more organised and structured discussion of what is read. The first is Twitter writ large.

Both practices have their value, but the assumption that reading and reflection is superior has had its day, unless it’s a normative pronouncement as opposed to a description of social reality.

So there may be a role for slow and fast in this fast moving media world. But slow needs to catch up, and fast needs to slow down and be more reflective if it’s to compete with the best of slow.

But that needs to be understood, and the limits of the publics who are both being invoked and created through these discourses have to be recognised too.

I will say that it is a bit of a worry that a heap of stuff that needs to have been factored in, including but not limited to the actual policy shift involved in the CPRS amendments, what’s happening elsewhere in the world in the lead up to Copenhagen, the new dimensions of climate change, and even what the government has at stake, has completely dropped off the radar. At LP, we’ve tried our best to keep that stuff in focus. But it’s been slim pickings anywhere else, with only a few distinguished exceptions such as New Matilda.

Some lessons need to be drawn from all this which transcend the tired dichotomies of legacy and social media, and I hope they will be.

Ps: LP can be followed on Twitter here.

Elsewhere: Axel Bruns at Gatewatching.

Update: The Newspoll results analysed tonight certainly suggest a disjunction between press commentary and voters’ sentiments, and indeed, the view from the Canberra political class and Liberal voters in the cities.