What these people have to realize is that policy choices made by the people who shape the internet will have huge consequences for the future of the internet, and probably none are quite as big as net neutrality.
Here's one smaller example:
The question is this. If Twitter is a news-delivery service, and I believe it is, what are the real dimensions of a nugget of news?So the future of news seems to rely heavily on new technologies like twitter. I don't doubt for a second that that's true, and we're already seeing it. It's just important to understand that policy choices in the structure of these technologies, even as small as how many characters to allow per tweet, can have huge impacts on our future discourse.
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The actual number, the average [character] length of a Times "nugget-of-news" is this: 185
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[T]he answer is fairly clear. 140 [characters] is not enough, not even for the average nugget. And to be able to hold the largest one, the max would have to be 250 or 300. And there would be no room for the link, even shortened, in that size nugget.
1 comments:
Great point. And of course in the Twitter case, its choices were driven by decisions that were made a decade ago by technology providers upstream (i.e. the maximum length of SMS messages in the U.S.).
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