India, May 11 -- "Cat mom. Disaster. Fuelled by coffee. Tweets my own." The average bio on X may seem absurd, but as we've all learnt, it isn't easy to compress one's personality into a handful of characters. Across social-media platforms, bios become miniature stage shows; performances defined by character limits. This is our selves in shorthand; compressed, stylised and designed to stand out in a crowd. The urge to thus impress one's identity on strangers isn't itself new. From ancient traders' tags to calling cards and early descriptors on SixDegrees.com (one of the world's first social networking sites, launched in 1997), humans have sought to distil the essence of the self in order to make a quick but memorable impression. Today, on da...