About Gup Shup

Welcome to this space. Let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Raj Singh. I was born and raised in Toronto, ON, Canada, and am currently a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA, USA. My research at M.I.T. is devoted to understanding gup shup, an idea to which this space is dedicated. It actually wasn’t until I spent about a year and a half in Amsterdam that I realized I wanted to devote my research (and other) efforts to understanding and contributing to this idea, to gup shup.

“Gup shup” is a Punjabi term meaning something like the English “chit chat.” It conveys the idea of conversation among people in a very relaxed and open atmosphere. The term is formed by a linguistic process called “reduplication,” something like the way in English we’d say “coffee shmoffee.” The point of this space is to enable gup shup to occur freely, without any artifical restrictions imposed by outside influences, the way we find in other “public” forums, such as the corporate media.

My research on gup shup explores the formal mechanisms that allow it to occur so efficiently. It uses tools from linguistics, theoretical computer science, probability theory, game theory, and mathematical logic. Thus, to study gup shup, I must be able to engage in gup shup with many different scientific disciplines. However, at another level, it is a well-establiished fact that gup shup is crucial for the existence of democracy. I will use this space to both relay information about the formal mechanisms governing gup shup, as well as to provide a space in which the free-flowing activity of gup shup may occur. As such, I hope that this site will contribute to what Jurgen Habermas has called “the public sphere,” a place where citizens can debate, question, argue, share, and perhaps agree on issues that occupy their thoughts, their hearts, or any other aspect of their being.

Over drinks one night, I remarked to a good friend of mine, Daniel Loreto, that the internet allows for the empowerment of the public in ways that didn’t quite exist before. Since he’s much smarter than me, he corrected me, arguing that it actually makes democracy feasible for perhaps the first time in human history. I agree. Perhaps you don’t. Let us discuss.