Virtual Gerrymandering

I think that these days, peoples' opinions are reflected in what online community they mentally live in, not what geographical community they physically live in. I think that political representation should reflect this.

To bring back some of the political experience of a "city", I propose "Virtual Geography" in which people can form virtual city- states and have House (of Commons) representation based on membership in those states. In other words, city- dwellers would join "internet forums" and for each census each city-dweller would have to report a single "internet forum" where they reside on the Internet. Then, representative districts would be drawn up or "gerrymandered" in a way that (hopefully) placed like- minded people into districts. Free of geographic constraints, this "gerrymandering" process seems like it would more closely approximate people's actual opinions, since Internet Forums can be grouped into ideologically- similar "virtual representative districts" without the limitations of geography.

This plan would increase the diversity of political discussion, by assigning representatives to speak for people who are a distinct City or State but who are geographically dispersed.

Travel to faraway cities used to take weeks or months. As a result, cities had more of a unique character: accent, dress, customs, and identity. Also, people tended to have more blood relatives living close by. Hundreds of years ago, representation based on geography made sense.

The shift from small agricultural towns to large cities, and the high frequency of movement within cities, means that "cities" these days are often purely economic zones which are more or less the same anywhere in the world, with the same fashions, the same coffee shops, and the same traffic. As a result, the representatives elected by the cities tend to be similar too.

This change to virtual cities would increase the variety of political opinions in the House (of Commons), and each representative would be backed by a virtual city of voters who agree fairly closely with the representative's platform. Instead of a choice between two parties, each voter would have the choice to join one of possibly hundreds of "virtual cities" each with a unique platform. The representatives elected by these cities would still need to vote for one of the two parties, but they could at least speak for their supporters' unique views.