Twitter is altering language, not just on Twitter, but across all media. Everything is being compactified; short attention spans demand it. Among the benefits are brevity, efficiency, and impact. The downside is the destruction of nuance and precision. Dropped indefinite articles, sentence fragments, and an explosion of abbreviations and acronyms. The danger is a form of Newspeak, in which a decrease in expressiveness of language yields a constricting of thought itself.
Will our capacity for conceptualization be limited to the lowest common denominator or will this punchy format lead to communicating new ideas that otherwise would have collected dust in long-form academic essays?
