"What hath God wrought?”, said Samuel Morse, in the first ever message despatched via electrical telegraph in May 1844. It takes Twitterers like Damian McBride to bring us back down to earth.

Mr McBride’s emails were vulgar and mean-spirited, but there is an argument that they might have remained the stuff of Westminster pub banter if they had not been captured in digital form. What was different was that he may have been planning to make their content public, and that they were indeed in digital form.

One easy response to the advent of new communications gadgetry is to reach, like Samuel Morse, for heavenly metaphors. The internet is certainly as revolutionary a tool as the printing press, and in this issue we take a critical but constructive look at what its presence is doing to us.

It is, however, only ever as powerful as we allow it to be. Like many technologies before it, the web certainly plays havoc with our ideas about what should be made public and what should remain private, yet it is too easy to lay blame or lavish praise on the technology itself. In the case of Mr McBride, the febrile nature of the blogosphere cannot excuse his catastrophic failure of judgement in seeking to make unsubstantiated gossip public. Likewise, cameraphones and the net helped collar the thuggish policemen who lashed out during the G20 demonstrations in London, but that hardly serves as a panacea for police brutality.

The Westminster village is all abuzz with middle-aged politicians learning how to Facebook and what to Twitter. Just like marketers, they are thirsting for new ways to keep in touch. Yet we should be wary of expecting too much from technology. The net cannot take the place of leadership or vision, and politicians are not going to refresh their constituencies out of virtual thin air. Westminster may have fallen in with the other bloggers of London, but the global village remains as far away as ever.

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