Neuroskeptic comments on new study findings that suggest “conversational” tweets (tweets that begin with “@”) are getting shorter:
The difference is mainly due to people using fewer words. The length of the most-used words didn’t change very much, but the number of words per tweet fell… So tweeters are
becoming less verbose (within any given tweet), which the authors suggest might represent the development of more economical linguistic conventions adapted to Twitter. But is this true of everyone?
Broadly speaking, yes – at least in terms of English-language tweets. The slope of the decline was similar in the USA and in tweets originating from the rest of the world. However within the US, [researchers Christian M.] Alis and [May T.] Lim found a remarkable state-by-state variability (Bear in mind however that few tweets have geolocatable info, so the sample sizes,and representativeness, of these data here are lower)… The average @ utterence from Louisiana is just 27 characters, compared to 43 in Montana.
Why? State average income and educational attainment were weak predictors of length, but Alis and Lim say that the biggest factor they found was… race. States with more African-Americans produced shorter tweets.
The Dish 