To get to work I usually take the London Overground train from Highbury to Kensington. It’s part of a rail line that orbits central London around four miles out, allowing people to move around the city while remaining within urban areas and steering clear of the centre. It spares me the ordeal of travelling through central London at rush hour, so I’m really glad it exists.

People who share a regular journey eventually form communities based around shared patterns of group behaviour rather than personal relationships. A well-known example from the Tube can be seen when people boarding the train stand aside to let others get off first – that’s a behavioural pattern that Tube travellers follow, and new travellers quickly learn. Lots of these little patterns exist among commuter communities which, despite being only temporary rush-hour formations, are communities nonetheless.

Most people only take one regular route, so may not notice the behavioural patterns that fleetingly bond them to their fellow travellers. But I’ve recently started taking another regular route, down to the City of London, which has got me thinking a lot more about this.

It’s a far shorter commute for me, only two stops. It’s also a more conventional “spoke-to-hub” commute: the route begins outside London and bores its way inwards to stop at Moorgate, in the city’s central zone. This is in stark distinction to the radial nature of the Overground route.

Over time I’ve started to notice how the patterns of the City community differ from those of the Overground. The most significant difference relates to overcrowding.

On Overground trains an unspoken rule is, “move down the carriage”. Travellers follow this rule silently – as space appears further down the carriage, people move up to leave space nearer the doors. When the rule is ignored and an unnecessary crush develops, the offenders are loudly admonished – “can you move down please!” – and things soon right themselves.

How the Overground handles overcrowding

But on the City commute things are different. A train pulls into the platform and there’s lots of space. But then you look at the  doorways, and it’s jammed solid – everyone has bunched up near the doors. You think, that’s not a problem; people will move. But this isn’t the Overground. The people in the doorways, already uncomfortably compressed, simply inhale sharply as you wedge yourself in next to them. The train is silent. No-one moves, and no-one is asked to move.

This community seems to have a different rule – “don’t rock the boat”. Shouting into the sheer silence would mark you as a lunatic. It’s a powerful rule: I’ve seen people abandon their attempts to board the train, choosing to wait ten minutes for the next one rather than cause a fuss by telling people to move into the empty space.

Suburbanites heading to the City stay in the doorways

How has the City community formed such different behavioural patterns than the Overground community? The routes use exactly the same trains, so it’s not carriage layout. And it’s not the suburban nature of the passengers – I’m an urbanite and I end up adhering to the pattern, as do others who get on at my stop. Some possible reasons are:

• The City community arrives at Moorgate, within walking distance of any office in the City, so many might never have to use the Tube. On the Tube, the authorities run frequent poster campaigns about how to behave – if they didn’t, the Tube (with its mixture of commuters, shoppers and tourists) would be sheer chaos. The Overground community is exposed to these campaigns but the City community, spared the ordeal of Tube travel, isn’t.
• My stretch of the City commute is underground so people don’t use mobile phones. This contributes to the oppressive silence: speaking aloud marks you out as a lunatic. But on the Overground, there’s a constant background babble of phone chat, which means it feels less strange to call out to other travellers.
• Everyone on the Overground is moving from one urban district to another, so most people have an “urban” rather than a suburban approach to personal space and group behaviour. They’re accustomed to being told to move on, get out of the way, budge up and so on.

These are only part of the story however. What these two communities have in common is that they exist only at rush hour, have highly transient memberships, and revolve around simple, unspoken rules of personal conduct. But they diverge from one another when it comes to behavioural patterns, for reasons that are numerous, complex and hard to fathom.

Back in December 2009, Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of politics and news, gave a sales pitch to a London audience of parliamentary researchers and policy wonks. Drawing on the the 2008 US presidential election as a case study, he encouraged his Westminster audience to place YouTube at the core of their campaigns for the 2010 election.

Also at this sales pitch was Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, who gave a detailed account of it on his blog. Despite the obviously commercial nature of the presentation, Cellan-Jones was fairly unquestioning in his write-up and went as far as suggesting that 2010 would see the UK’s first “YouTube election”.

That was then and this is now. As I write, the UK is in political limbo after voters returned a hung parliament and it’s obvious that the election wasn’t a YouTube election at all. But in truth, it was never going to be. YouTube is less of a social tool here than it is in the US, or than Steven Grove seemingly led Cellan-Jones to believe. If any online services were going to play a role here, it would have been Facebook or Twitter, which revolve around interpersonal communication rather than YouTube’s quasi-broadcasting model. But even these services seemed to have little effect on the course of the election.

Rory Cellan-Jones has today written a post describing how political parties used the internet in their campaigns – Labour’s “sophisticated use of Google’s AdSense system” and the Tory purchase of ad space on the YouTube home page are among the examples cited. I don’t think these are very inspiring, however. Ultimately the political parties simply bought media space, a part of election campaigning that’s nearly as old as the ballot box itself. It means little that the media space purchased was digital and not tree-based.

So social media didn’t play such a central role as some thought it would, and the political parties took a pretty humdrum approach to their digital activities. But how different were things in the world of “old” media? Did it turn out to be more of an X-Factor election than a YouTube election?

Traditional media outlets were in triumphant mood after the televised election debates which delivered such a boost for Nick Clegg. Media Week claimed  ‘old’ media was reasserting supremacy and even some digital agencies talked about “old media striking back”.

The consensus was that the Lib Dem surge, triggered by the first TV debate, was the election’s defining event. This proved that good old top-down broadcasting, not this new-fangled and un-Murdochian internet stuff, continued to shape the opinions of the public. But when election day came round the Lib Dem surge was nowhere to be seen. So it turned out that the effect of the TV debates was actually pretty short-lived and ephemeral.

Television, newspapers, YouTube and Facebook have all been vying for the chance to claim it was them wot won it. Rory Cellan-Jones, Media Week, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Grove – none of these people really got it right in the end. Like the election itself, the “old” vs “new” media battle  has failed to deliver a conclusive and straightforward result.