Social media’s ‘law’ of short messages
In the last year or two, you may have had some moments — during elections, sporting events, or weather incidents — when you found yourself sending out a flurry of messages on social media sites such as Twitter. You are not alone, of course: Such events generate a huge volume of social-media activity. Now a new study published by researchers in MIT’s Senseable City Lab shows that social-media messages grow shorter as the volume of activity rises at these particular times.“This helps us better understand what is going on — the way we respond to things becomes faster and more impulsive,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab and an associate professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Take Twitter, where individual messages have a 140-character limit. The study found that at times of lower activity, the most popular length of tweets ranges...