The byline says 'How the Internet Created Gen Z'. Ria is Gen Z (those born after 1996-7, she was born in 1999) and she writes about how her life and the lives of her generation has been impacted by the internet. It was quite revealing to me because I am not so much online as the Gen Zs and can identify it to the extent that my daughter A is Gen Z too. For the first time I got a proper peek into the life of Gen Z kids which include A who otherwise seem to be leading double lives, online lives which they definitely cannot share with us. So thanks Ria upfront for getting us oldies a peek into that mysterious life. Apparently those born after 2012 are called Gen Alpha.
Ria is a product of Lady Sriram College, a big online influencer A says (she's A's hero currently), is a youth advisor to Google and does a lot of work related to the internet. The book comes at a time when we are struggling for answers related to GenZ. It does answer quite a few and it should be made compulsory reading for all parents with Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids..
India got internet on August 15, 1995 (I was there... Though we had no clue about what it was). In the early days vsnl used to offer these services. It was quite hilarious because we could hardly connect and it kept going round and round in what was called buffering. The internet made us move from physical letters (I still have not moved fully) to email (hotmail), which I moved to very reluctantly. Then some websites came up like rediff.com which also offered email and a lot of useless news but we got our mail ids on rediff since it was free. Those days we also had this site called Sulekha.com where we could write and get published and it was such a leveller. Then came cybercafes which were much better but they had their own stories - (mostly love stories). Finally high speed internet. All that was what they call Web 1.0 I gather (1999-00). Web2.0 is a different beast with an active social media developed to hook you and pull you in and fully manipulates you if you aren't aware and can mess with you. I am not very equipped to deal with this beast so I have kept myself largely out of that space except blogging which is today's equivalent to letter writing.
Back to Ria. Web 2.0 had some defining parameters set at a conference that was held in 2005 or so if I remember right - that platforms improve user participation, apps could be used for service and a shift from individual to the collective. It's a rather grim statement she makes when she says Gen Z logged in but never logged out (reminds me of Hotel California)!
There's a line in the book that says - 'in the beginning the internet appeared good.. It was a tool we used, not a force that used us'. She cites the 'Robbers Cave' experiment to relate to behaviours on social media - each social media version having its own behaviour, it own unwritten rules, and how many get very gang like behaviors on the net. She makes a case for Gen Z when people ask what's wrong with them - they grew up with it - and it has given them ways to connect - but then also made them performative. The challenge Ria says is to reclaim agency. Reclaim choice, like in the early days.
The second essay is about love in the times of Web 2.0 and is aptly titled 'It's Complicated' - something people put on their statuses a while ago on facebook. I could never understand why a personal matter like falling in love would be advertised to the world but that seemed to be the norm then. What I did not know are some of the Gen Z secrets that Ria revealed. Apparently the net trended with 'orange peel test' (give an orange to you partner or boyfriend and check out if he will peel it or he will escape it - if he does not peel, red flag), 'Bird theory' (show an insignificant thing on the road like a bird and check whether he is interested in it and thereby in you and if he does not, red flag) and 'road test' (whether he is walking on the danger side of the road or is ready to push you off under the next bus which you so deserve, in which case red flag). Most girls seems to have tried out these tests on various unsuspecting boyfriends with results that might have caused all sorts of relation trouble (hey, you failed the peel test, you failed this and so on). With so many red flags going up its like a soccer match with a trigger happy referee! No wonder she quotes someone who says love is consensual hallucination (but then all of life is I feel). Ria says that in cyberspace it definitely is.
Growing up with fandoms of Potter, Hungry Games etc Gen Z began advertising their relationship status by posting a mysterious hand on Insta, adding someone's initial to your Insta bio, changing dp's on Whatsapp, checking couple goals, reels made by couples etc - which certainly makes things more complicated for a young person who is constantly on social media, which is where everyone of her peer group is. So we have labels like situationships, lists (the 3 red flags to watch out for), words like breadcrumbing, benching, catfishing, fleabagging, zumping, pop quizzes which sort partners into labels like golden retriever bf, soft boy bf, performative male, black cat gf, rodent man, Insta husband, stay at home gf, offline bf, sunshine partners - if you don't fit you are doomed. If you are labelled you are doomed. There are red flags, green flags and beige flags and you are constantly led by someone about how to love your partner or not. Romance, she says, is now content.
Then we have dating apps aplenty - she speaks of Bumble and Hinge - and how the apps and users are at variance with each others goals - users want long term partners and love and the app wants them to stay on the app forever (though I am not sure what anyone wants in love). Ria talks about the obsession with ratings and how they can be some kind of a self feeding mechanism - I agree with her. Chuck ratings and go for what appeals to you. The internet she says will ask you want you think love is and if you do not know, it will tell you. One line again from where I am not sure but I liked it - to love someone long term is to attend a 1000 funerals of the people they used to be.
The next essay is titled 'What's in my bag'. Ria makes a case for the LL Bean bag and how it was originally used to carry ice in the World War time and how they have now transformed into fashion statements or tote bags which are pretty much the pishwis that our grandmas used. People flaunt their totes from different stores - Strand, Blossoms and so on. Anyway the Gen Z problem is not the bag but what's in it and every personality has put out stuff from the bag on Insta, YouTube or Tiktok - the content in her bag describes her personality as ENFP or INFP or Clean Girl or that girl or surfer girl and so on. Obviously everyone wants to have those bags and curate their bags accordingly to get famous!
Ria says that these videos compress individuals into consumables. So you better carry one type of glasses, Birkenstock (shoes?) Taylor Swift merchandise, books etc. They call it the shoppable life. One study that is called Simulacra and something where all reality is replaced with symbols (hyper reality) until the connection with the utility is fully dissolved and only the symbol is left (Emperors New Clothes). Ria feels that another reason why GenZ buys so much is also because the stuff goes out of fashion soon or more so because they are not of the same good quality as before. Whichever way, people are using credit cards to buy these of things. She ends the chapter saying that when she thinks of the good times she had with her friends it was never about material stuff but a lot of personal stuff like a hug, a shared overnighter, a trip together etc. I agree.
'Eternal Sunshine' is the next topic and its basically about how the internet never lets you forget. Its her Manchester United moment she says - the internet brings up an old relationship where she followed the football club because her partner was crazy about it then but its been years since then but the internet does not forget, nor does it let her forget. The internet has changed memory she says. The ability to forget is crucial for survival for humans but the internet does not allow that (which Gen Z faces). It leads to the dangers of living in the past at the expense of the present. Ria talks of breakups now meaning deleting all the shared memories online form photos to Spotify lists, unsaving Zomato addresses, kicking people out of group chats.
She says that memory is reconstructed every time it is recalled and when you see the exact words you have saved on a screenshot or an archive or a comment, the same old feelings come up even if it has been years since the incident. 'To archive something is to exercise power,' she quotes. 'The power to decide what will be remembered and how it will be remembered'. So it may be her friend who has broken up, Taylor Swift who uses her past relationships to writer her songs, her ManU moment etc.
Why would we document someone's failings she says - but isn't that what makes us feel better?)The internet loves that, pulling people down, making them feel superior to the other by being mean. On the net memory is actively archived, curated and even weaponised. Platforms remember - photos, comments, likes, story views, drafts saved, locations visited she says. Digital forgetting is easy for the rich and not so easy for the common man. GenZ which fed into this culture without knowing now has a price to pay for it. There is this thing about the right to be Forgotten - a case fought by one Mario Gonzales against Google and won to remove content about him on the net.
Ria talks of souls in Greek mythology, which before they enter afterlife, drink from Lethe, the river of forgetting. Forgetting is necessary for rest. But now people are sharing more and more personal stories to create personal brands due to lack of awareness. Her advise to young Gen Z or Gen Alpha kids - do not write about things that are traumatic for you or that you have not fully processed.
In the next essay titled 'Ask Me Anything' she starts with the story of Indrani Mukherjea and how she knew all about her because she followed her daughter Vidhie on a site called Ask.fm where people upload profiles and based on the profiles others asked you questions and you could answer them and get likes form random people interested in these conversations. I have never heard of this site but apparently it was big. Pooja Bedia's daughter Aalia F, Sakshi Chopra from Ramanand Sagar's home, Ahaan Panday, Alaania jaaferi are celebrity names you might recognise by the surname. But then young kids who feel they are connected to these celebrities, who feel they have an imaginary audience are in for a shock. They get deluded with these para social relationships. At one point Ria says she herself became a hater, a mean person because she found that the best way to deal with her own disappointment at not going the way it should. Clearly, Ria says, humanness is conveyed through face to face interactions. Its difficult to say something bad to people's faces. But on the net, with anonymous identities you can be as mean or as rude as you want to be and that encourages that sort of behavior to grow. Again, the power to be mean to someone makes you feel better.
'15 seconds' of fame is about how the number of influencers is rising in India - from less than a million in 2020 to about 4 million in 2025 and each of them is putting a lot of effort and money and sometimes risk into it for the 15 minutes of fame. YouTube which started as a dating service saw that instead of dating people were posting random stuff about their lives on the site and they decided to just be that - a place where people could post videos. YouTube also decided to reward their content creators and shared revenue. Now with so much content, there is an attention deficit and we now live in what is called an attention economy. The dangers are that the brain will get fried as it does with our memories and phone numbers and stuff.
Now again, who gets to be famous has a definite trend , upper class and savarna classes who look down on poor content. Ria says she predicted that a day will come when influencers will kill themselves due to their relationship with the social media and sadly enough, it happened and caused another media circus.
'Post Knowledge' - Ria digs into Greek mythology and introduces us to Prometheus (Foresight), and his brother Epimetheus (Hindsight) who are given the task of populating the earth with people. However Prometheus likes humans a lot and starts helping them out causing much anger to Zeus who curses that humans shall have no fire and will live in dark and cold. Prometheus decides otherwise and steals a spark from the Mount of Olympia and gives it to humans which again pisses off Zeus who punishes Prometheus by tying him to a cliff where vultures come and eat his liver every day, and then he heals at night and then the vultures come the next day etc thereby calling such a position 'Prometheus Bound'.
From that we move to 1868 when a young Melvil Dewey tries to save his burning library and later come sup with a decimal based system to organise human knowledge in a 44 page classification. Today 2 lakh libraries use that 1876 classification in 135 countries Then we move to the next person John Dewey who differentiated between 'thinking' and 'thinking well'. Thinking well allows us to peedict the future using knowledge in the present. Ria herself tried her hand at KBC and won 3.5 lakh before hitting a question she did not know the answer to - but she guessed right using her logical powers of reasoning. She is good at funda based questions and not so at knowing the right answers which relies more on memory..
I liked the part where she mentions Plato (and another chap) distrusting writing - saying that it would lead to the decay of memory as it will create forgetfulness. People will stop using their memories and will appear omniscient without knowing anything. They will be tiresome company he says. She cites an article in 2008 which is titled "Is Google making us Stupid" (yes). But then has the internet made us smarter, yes. The smartest person in he room they say now is the room. Collective intelligence. Knowledge today she says is about asking better questions. Ria also stuck her neck out and predicted a a few things among which one stayed with me - that people will get tired of dating apps and face to face will come back into fashion.
'In Coming of Age' or a frequently used word in her book 'bildungsroman' (a German word that means coming of age) she laments that Bollywood is not using or recognising the extent to which technology or internet has pervaded our lives and they hardly show it well. One reason is that the internet does not make for good drama and provides simplistic solutions if one doe snot understand the technology and the user and their relationship. She however cites a few movies which she says use the internet well - Kho Gayen Hum Kahan (seen), Logout on Zee5, LSD 2. She cites a web serial called Anupamaa as a poor way of showing Internet.
Anyway she ends the book saying that whatever it is, the experience of Genz has been that 'I was there. I saw what happened. This is how it made me feel' It mattered.' And I am sure they will see many many versions and variants of the net and its applications and use it well. For someone so young Ria writes very well on a topic which is so vast, so nebulous, and brings a disarming honesty and vulnerability to it that you end up changing your mind about GenZ. Well researched with many references to Greek mythology or books or articles. I loved it and read it twice and made some notes before I attempted to write about it. And yes, A has been telling me about this book for a while, having gone to attend Ria's lecture at Miranda House and then getting a signed copy (and a coffee as well after if i remember right) and I listened in my half-attentive manner and woke up fully to what she was saying after I read the entire book. Thank you Ria, for making a solid case for Gen Z...I think I understand A's life and its challenges a little better after reading the book. And here's wishing you many more books to come.
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