A closer look
Our society's inability to express nuanced thoughts is directly tied to a 1980s telecommunications standard. When Twitter launched in 2006, smartphones weren't ubiquitous, so the platform was built to work via SMS text messages. Since international SMS standards limited texts to 160 characters, Twitter allocated 20 characters for the user's handle and exactly 140 characters for the actual tweet. We spent over a decade condensing complex political arguments into 140 letters purely because of a pager-era data restriction.
