As a fan of duration and speed, I was intrigued when I read that movies are getting longer. The comment was that increasing length was a response to increased demand for content, for stories and entertainment. I guess that once we get you watching a movie, we have your attention for a longer time with a longer movie.
You may have noticed the fracturing of many areas, markets and groups. It might be that increased communication enables more players to participate in any type of market. So, we have streaming, more channels, reality shows, reruns. Machines and advanced practices may allow translation into more languages. Higher levels of education increase the variety of content that is of interest to greater numbers of people. Increased longevity means that elders, often retired or semi-retired, have time and interest in a wide range of topics and types of content.
The book "Too Big to Know" by Weinberger emphasizes that the number of sources, web sites, topics available on the internet. The whole thing and most of its subparts are too big to know. We can't read all the interesting pieces available each day, a problem that E.B. White complained about In his article "Irtnog" back in 1935. He envisioned a digest of digests of digests etc. to the point that a reader could feel that he was up on everything for that day when he knew the word of the day. One day, for instance, the word that digested everything written that day was "Irtnog". Cool, huh?
We all have limited time and limited patience. When you want to give me an important tip, I may be interested but not if you go on and on. If your message involves hours of listening, I am not interested, even if it is the answer to all my problems. My patience and even my remaining years of life are too limited.
I imagine that the Big Tweeter of Washington, D.C. needs to condense his words and uses that avenue just because short comments are the norm and there are limits on the length. If he goes on too long, people will pay less attention. There is a TED talk about text messages https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2014/07/late-today-chats-tweets-and-text.html
