We're voting with our feet.

Fewer people than ever are voting, fewer people are watching mainstream TV. Have you noticed the mass turn off? Have you switched off?

The numbers tell their own story: BBC 1's annual share is down to almost half what it was 20 years ago (1981 39 per cent, 2004 25 per cent - source BARB).

In 2001, the turnout at the election was just 59 per cent, the lowest since 1918 and in 2005 it was up just a couple of points.

So - is politics really dead? This flies in the face of what we see around us. Again, the numbers speak for themselves.

Think of that million who marched against the war; the turnout at the May anticapitalism demo. Then recall the numbers on the Countryside Alliance marches. That's before we get to the membership of organisations like Amnesty. 200,000 members in the UK alone are part of the global organisation with 1.5 million members. If you look at the broader interest groups, like the

Ramblers, then you see they well over the six-digit barrier.

These numbers on their own do not seem to be big enough to topple any Government but bear in mind that some seats are won by wafer thin numbers of under 100.

The establishment obviously still controls our daily lives, but marginals matter. The same is exactly the same in the media world. Instead of calling it apathy, we call it fragmentation and we track hits and pages and reach, and experts scramble to find where to spend our communications budgets.

Just look at the explosion in email and texting, browsing and blogging. As consumers, we love Coronation Street , but we are now getting to love our own content. The individual or

peer to peer is chipping away at the mainstream. Does this matter? Clearly in terms of our political economy we're going to have problems if we do not get the system aligned better to the electorate's demands but more discussion of that is not for here.

It's tough to work out where to invest and where the returns will be but my gut feel is that applications that work to deliver better one-to-one experiences will be where the money is: they offer scale, margin and, supported by a decent patent or trade mark.

Think of how you want more out of your mobile, more out of your digital radio and, looking at the latest Apple successes, we all want more music on the move. You can see how each of those platforms has plenty more profit in it.

The failure of the political system to modernise to meet the demands of the electorate is deeply concerning, but the fragmentation of the media markets is throwing up potential we could never have foreseen.

Anthony Robb-John is lawyer in the media team at Cobbetts