Tony Abbott's transition to government has been an orderly thing in its opening days.

Abbott, by keeping his arrival as prime minister elect low key, is in part deferring to a collective exhaustion stemming from the longest election season that I've witnessed in my years of reporting from Canberra. We are recovering now from a brutal epic which opened in June 2010 with the coup against Kevin Rudd, rolled on into the "real Julia" election of 2010, and then on through the 43rd parliament (which Abbott contested ferociously at every step until his final, decisive, "positive" flip into the 2013 election). Years of permanent campaign, no respite, tends to promote weariness.

But Abbott's gentle gait as he moves into government is about more than allowing both the voters and institutional Canberra a moment to breathe and adjust to the new regime. Abbott is opening the way he means to continue in terms of tone. He actually wants to slow the frenetic pace of politics. If he can crack the magic formula for calming things down, that is very much in his interests over the medium term.

Politics in most liberal democracies is increasingly at war with an accelerating and fragmenting news cycle which in short order renders everything disposable and forgettable and obsolescent, whether it's profound or whether it's trivial. The current fragmentation and the rolling bandwagon culture of the online world and social media works against the interests of activist governments with any reform ambition.

Outgoing New York mayor and media baron Michael Bloomberg remarked on this reality recently in an interview with The New Yorker. "Modern technology is making it very difficult to govern," he said. "This is going to be one of the big problems down the road. Traditionally, we've elected somebody to a term and they have that term to do things and then explain why it's the right thing to do, and to prove it's the right thing to do before they have to face the voters again. We're going into a world where there's an instant referendum on everything before it even starts. And I think that's going to change how decisions are made in government for the worse."

The choppy environment created by profound innovations in technology, in social networking and by the structural change playing out in the commercial media, benefitted Abbott in opposition. It's a generalisation, but the environment benefits professional oppositionists more than it assists incumbents.

The rolling 24/7 cacophony worked positively for Abbott in the following ways - it spooked the Labor government into chasing shadows in the news cycle (a self-defeating addiction it couldn't shake); it created an "occupy" culture where talking points were mass-produced with the purpose of creating a consistent line, regardless of who was delivering it (fine in theory, but in practice senior ministers sounded like automatons and the whole effort diverted scarce resources that could have been directed more productively elsewhere); and the echo chamber also amplified Abbott's rhetorical efforts during the most destructive phase of opposition.

Abbott also possessed a structural benefit in the Australian media market which is derived from its unusual concentration of mainstream media ownership. Abbott benefitted from a concerted campaign against Labor by the News Corp publications that predated the 2013 election and intensified once the protagonists hit the hustings. News Corp, while facing the same commercial pressure as any other newspaper company anywhere in the world, remains the dominant print player in this country. Unlike most newspaper companies preoccupied during this digital transition with the elegiac business of burying their dead paper format, News Corp simply won't desist from the romance of print. It has not lost faith in the power of its newspapers to make and break governments.

So two trends working against each other in fact combined to deliver near perfect conditions for Abbott's ascension to power. News Corp's profound belief in the old ways of mass communication and its market dominance assisted the Coalition; and the surrounding cacophony of the online world lifted the old-school newspaper satire and the visceral editorial sentiment and circulated it ever more widely, with the precision of whipping wind. It's a peculiar case study with the potential to animate journalism seminars for some time to come.

Obviously Labor's loss and Abbott's election victory is much more complex and multifactorial than the set of conditions I've just outlined - but the media and communications environment is a critical intrusion to be managed by all modern governments. Which takes us to our purpose in this dispatch, which is to look forward to Abbott's next steps rather than rake endlessly over the immediate past.

Abbott's instinct, as we've flagged, is to slow down the pace of the political discussion. The Howard government was big on the orderly framing of the daily news cycle. This was achieved by "drops" to the newspapers in the morning which would last the day and frame the television news at night. This was of course back in the days when there was not several distinct news cycles throughout the day; a more orderly system of media management could actually deliver you a bit of stillness and stickiness - you could, in fact, do a lot less and achieve a better result.

The conundrum for Abbott and his incoming government is how to do less, slow it all down, stop the relentless churn - without handing over the space to your opponents. Sky News and ABC News 24 are not intending to shut down their rolling news operations, the live updates and rolling news blogs will plough on, the crowds that have formed online aren't going to disperse in deference to a new regime seeking a more manageable national affairs discourse.

In the end, absent a 24/7 armistice, where the major parties both agree to chop the feed for Sky News, or send the live bloggers to jail - the Coalition can only control what it does communications-wise, it cannot mandate the tempo for others. Exiting the field creates a vacuum which opponents will happily fill. Abbott's deft management of the communications environment in opposition after all gives his successor in opposition a handy template on which to draw.

In the immediate future, in the honeymoon afforded any new government, the set of circumstances that played in the Coalition's favour during the recent election will likely go on delivering net benefits for the new government as it finds its feet.

The real question is whether the Coalition is thinking deeply enough about the really profound consequences of structural change, and how they might play out if the current environment shifts - if News Corp becomes critical (it's inevitable, just a question of how long it takes); if the effort to moderate the pace of the conversation allows political opponents to disrupt and redirect the daily messaging.

The Coalition gives a perception that it is still grounded in analogue thinking. Labor, for all its missteps and faults, is further ahead on the path of self-publishing and direct communications with voters and audiences in order to avoid or circumvent the media filters. All political parties now need to innovate in this territory.

It is also not clear yet whether the Coalition grasps that the old Canberra "access" game has shifted since it last occupied the government benches. In the recent past, governments could serve their communications interests by a system of access and lock-outs - choosing to share or withhold information was the primary means by which politics sought to control (and let's be honest, manipulate) the beat reporters of politics.

Access and lock-outs is still a card politics can and does play, but the silly game of manipulating pieces on a chessboard mattered much more before fragmentation.

Once a story lands in the public domain these days - it is everywhere within minutes. Reporters are nostalgic for the days when their scoops lasted for more than the time it takes to tweet, or file a blog post, or an update. Now information is common currency moments after it appears.