As with philosophy, poetry is a time-intensive practice that requires deep focus and concentration. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and the host of real-time-web feed services belong on the opposite side of the spectrum. They are quintessentially distraction-based media; shallow on context and truncated into staccato bursts of conversation.
Before he was Google's Chief Economist, Hal Varian wrote a piece on Markets for Information Goods, which included this telling quote on the increasing scarcity of time:
The supply of information (in virtually every medium) grows exponentially whereas the amount that is consumed grows at best linearly. This is ultimately due to the fact that our mental powers and time available to process information is constrained. This has the uncomfortable consequence that the fraction of the information produced that is actually consumed is asymptoting towards zero.
