Peter Suderman’s post on why, in the present context, Republicans should be a little less Twitterpated and a little more focused on old-fashioned blogging seems exactly right to me. A better way to circulate soundbites is great, but right now the party needs to work on churning out some actual substantive ideas that it can later reduce to soundbites. A better way to mobilize your community of supporters is great, but it helps to have a clear sense of what you’re supporting first, which Twitter’s not so good at. If anything, Twitter seems likely to retard necessary rethinking, because if you’re constrained to 140 characters, it’s a hell of a lot easier to invoke and reinforce a familiar idea than to broach a new one. That makes it great for building solidariy—right on, man! retweet!—but not so hot for thinking through reform.

I can think of a use of Twitter that might be more helpful at this stage, though I’m not sure there are Republicans using it this way.  What might be helpful is that you can see how tweets or links propagate—I just discovered the invaluable backtweets, which makes it possible to trackback shortened links—and detect issues where there’s unexpected common ground or surprising salience. In other words, Twitter currently is most likely to be useful as a massive data set—a friend who works there tells me they jokingly call it “The Great Brain Machine”—more than a propaganda tool. Mike Masnick recently noted that social networks provide the kind of information a previous generation’s pollsters couldn’t have dreamed of—allowing us to track, for instance, the relative frequency of terms like “hired” and “laid off” in Facebook profiles. The users of these services aren’t a representative sample, to be sure, but neither are people who answer telephone polls. We all know the old story about the university that supposedly watched how students walked across the lawn from building to building, then paved the trodden paths. A party looking for a majority coalition will, as Peter suggests, want to do some strictly intellectual work in deciding what they ought to stand for. But they might also look to see what patterns of affinity and concern in the voting population aren’t well tracked by existing—and for the GOP shrinking—political clusters.