Adaptation of fictional and online conversations to communication media

Abstract

Abstract. Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking platform, we show that the utterance length of conversations is slowly shortening with time but adapts more strongly to the constraints of the communication medium. This indicates that the introduction of any new medium of communication can affect the way natural language evolves.PACS. 89.65.Ef Social organizations; anthropology -89.20.-a Interdisciplinary applications of physics

Quantifying Regional Differences in the Length of Twitter Messages

“…1b ). As previously observed [ 36 , 38 ], the message length distributions are skewed ( S1 Fig .). At least 75% of the messages in each district have a message length of at most 90 characters, which is 64% of the length limit, or 73% of the available limit after subtracting the 15-character limit of a Twitter username and one @ sign.…”

“…The 140-character length limit of tweets does not seem to affect the length of most conversation messages on Twitter . In Twitter , the median conversational message length is 38 characters while in books it is 48 characters, and 25 characters in movies [ 36 ]. If the same length limit of 140 characters was imposed on books and movies, then only 8.96% of the messages in the former and 0.012% of messages in the latter would reach the limit.…”

Spatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter

“…4, outside US). It was previously observed in utterances from movies and books [1] albeit at a rate 1 and 3 orders of magnitude smaller (-0.266 char./year in books; -0.001897 char./year in movies), respectively. Although conversations do tend to get shorter in time, our current findings show that it is occurring faster now on Twitter.…”

“…The utterance length distribution (ULD) of the entire data set ( Fig. 1A) is bimodal and can be fitted with a gamma distribution after taking the 140-character limit into account [1]. It is bimodal due to the mixture of the natural (unconstrained) ULD and shortened (constrained) ULD forced by the 140character limit.…”

“…Utterances, the speaking turns in a conversation, relay short bits of information. Though utterances adapt strongly to medium [1], utterance shortening has been observed over a span of two centuries. Here we show that utterances in the online social medium Twitter did not only significantly shorten in a span of a few years but also varied geographically-providing evidence of increasing usage of jargon brought about by formation of groups.…”