For those of us who grew up in urban, English-speaking India in the 70s (that's a sure sign of the academic, the need to qualify and delimit the who, when, where, otherwise known as the subject location! ), the title of this post may ring a bell (remember the song Psychobabble by the Alan Parsons Project?). But that's just the inspiration for the title. Last week Prof Ananda Mitra of Wake Forest University (North Carolina, USA) visited Hyderabad briefly and talked about his current passion, the idea of "big data" and the "narrative bits" (see http://www.narbs.info/ for more) that we generate as we leave our verbal traces on the Internet through facebook posts and gmail status messages. As I listened to him, this is the verbal trace I generated... Update your status Tweet a tweet Post a post maybe upload an insta-picture and geo-tag yourself into existence. Tell a story of the self and the Other using a virtual machinery of clicks and comment
making sense of the everyday