A pretty informal study made the global headlines a week back about how 40% of everything posted to Twitter amounts to just "pointless babble". That conclusion is seriously flawed, and likely stems from a misunderstanding on how humans communicate. Our consciousness has very low bandwidth. Exactly how low is hard to measure, but in The User Illusion author Tor Nørretranders argues it to be around 16 bits-or-so per second. Thus, when humans communicate we do so trying to guess as to how many bits we need to use to get our full message across to another person, and that requires us to share a lot of background information.
Book · Consciousness · Culture · English · Twitter
2 minutes