Except that "people in Philadelphia suck" isn't a shorter way of saying "some people in Philadelphia suck". It's an entirely different statement.

Why not shorten it to "some Philadelphians suck"? It's shorter and, arguably, more accurate.

>The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.

I disagree that the limit encourages vagueness, bold proclamations, and absolutes. Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)

> "It's an entirely different statement."

Which is the point. The character limit creates miscommunication because people wind up submitting something other than what they set out to communicate.

> "Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)"

So you're agreeing that Twitter, as a medium, presents a unique challenge to how most humans communicate in most other media and requires special consideration and effort?

That doesn't actually sound like a disagreement.

This is a really good point. An interesting psychology experiment could measure the susceptibility of subjects to stereotype threat after they read a given newsfeed. I hypothesize that because of the "priming" effects of each newsfeed, subjects who read the same set of tweets would score similarly on the stereotype test. This would be in like with the results of the famous John Bargh study where subjects subconsciously decreased their walking speed, for instance, after reading words related to the elderly.

It's a scary thought that the opinions of society can be clustered by similarity of Twitter newsfeeds. That sounds ripe for manipulation and propaganda dissemination.