With twitter experimenting with 280 characters per tweet, I was reminded of something that I had read years ago (and as a result cannot locate and attribute now). It went something like this:
The main advantage with twitter is that it battles attention starvation. We’re bombarded with information all the time. But our time to focus on things is limited. By enforcing a small limit, twitter makes it possible to focus on what to transmit and what to receive in the small chunks of time available to consume what runs through the webs.
Besides the term attention starvation the reconstruction of the thesis is all mine.
Update: Dimitris argues that this works in favor of the alt-right.
Managing organized complexity 