When French President Macron stood in New Delhi last week urging India to back a global under-15 social media ban, he was having a conversation India hasn’t quite had with itself. Ria Chopra has. The 26-year-old Gen Z internet culture expert created her Instagram at 14 and has spent the last few years thinking carefully about what the internet actually did to her generation. At a time when Indian states are considering age-related social media restrictions even as Meta faces a million-dollar trial for teen social media addiction, her debut book ‘Never Logged Out’ examines the impact of the internet on Gen Z without resorting to moral panic or nostalgia. In an interview with “elderly millennial” Sharmila Ganesan Ram, Chopra aka @riachops talks about permacrisis, attention depreciation, the price of digital fame and why India needs its own internet reckoning.Writing a book about something as vast, amorphous and dynamic as the internet and its impact on Gen Z can be like trying to hold on to sand. What prompted the undertaking?I started developing an interest in writing about India’s young people and our internet while working at an independent media house, because I became aware of how few stories in that field were being covered in India. ‘Internet culture’ is, till today, not a standalone beat at a lot of Indian publications, so we read a lot of narratives about the West, but not enough analysis of our own digital existence. I wanted to read empathetic, sensitive writing that aimed to understand. As an experiment, I started to write about the themes that interested me, and my writing seemed to resonate with people my age. Over the years, I gathered my ideas that I felt required more space, depth, and detail to explain. I drew up a book proposal, and well.. here we are! The fact that my internet experience is only one amongst many was something I kept in mind while doing my research and writing. Which is why there is a lot of citing of other sources in my book. There is also the challenge of longevity – the internet changes so quickly, and book publishing is a notoriously slow industry, so one has to trust oneself to pick examples and anecdotes that will stay relevant for years to come. Before we get to your book about Gen Z, a quick word association round:Galgotias – Chinese robot dog 🙂Brain Rot – inevitableMatcha – tastes like grass (sorry!)Girl dinner – subtle misogynyYou are a Gen Z person who created your Instagram account in 2013 at age 14. I’m an elderly millennial whose social media game lasted only as long as Orkut. Yet, according to your debut book ‘Never Logged Out’, we are almost the same age in “internet years”…‘Internet years’ is a theory I have expanded upon in the book – an argument that the years we have spent on the internet should be noted as a demographic market, because they change how we parse and process the world around us. People can be the same age in physical years – for instance, a child in New York, a child in New Delhi, and a child in rural Chattisgarh can share a birthday – but they would have spent a different amount of time on the internet because they got access at different times. Their age in internet years is different, and hence their access to information is different, and how they process things is different, and what is important to them is different. On the other hand, two people might be different ages in physical years, but if both got internet access in the same year, then they’d have spent the same amount of time online – which means they’re the same age in internet years. We must count our internet ages, as well as our physical ages, to properly understand what the internet has done to us.How do you define Gen Z in India, where 30 percent of the population was born between 1997 and 2012, and how did the internet shape the generation’s sense of self?There is actually no single, internationally accepted definition of ‘Gen Z’ at all, which means that everyone who researches or writes about this generation must define it for themselves. I have focused on highlighting this gap, and pointing out how most Western researchers acknowledge the internet as one of the most defining cultural events to have shaped Gen Z. However, in India, a massive chunk of our population only got internet access in 2016, with Jio. This means that a lot of generational studies, and broad sweeping ‘Gen Z is….’ kinds of research findings we see are simply not applicable in our reality. Hence, to define ‘Gen Z’ in India, we need to also start measuring when and how the population got access to the internet, along with measuring their physical/chronological age.You use the term “permacrisis” to describe Gen Z’s emotional climate…‘Permacrisis’ is regularly used in writing/research/culture commentary circles to describe the permanent state of stress, instability, and psycho-emotional upheaval that a lot of young people exist in today, due to the world throwing one crisis after another at us: climate change, geopolitical instability, rising conservatism globally, genocides, COVID-19, inflation, economic collapse, mass lay-offs, the advent of AI, and so on. This seemingly never-ending state of crisis has almost become our default mode, and hence is called the permacrisis.Recent studies link excessive screen time to cognitive decline. Do you think these fears about shrinking attention spans are justified?I think they’re quite justified – though it depends also on what one is using screens for. Someone reading news articles on the web or watching a three-hour long nature documentary will experience their screen time differently than someone watching flashy, AI generated short-form reels. Multiple researches have shown that the way we use our screens matters – as does the fact that social media is designed in a way to keep us multitasking, to pull our attention in different directions all the time, to show us notifications and pop-up icons to make us click. This means we are forced into engaging mindlessly, shallowly. I call this ‘attention depreciation’ in my book. If the attention economy is to truly be imagined as an ‘economy,’ then the value of our attention as currency is falling.With tech leaders facing litigation over social media’s mental-health impact and studies suggesting many teens are online almost constantly, should India consider age-based restrictions as Australia and France already have? I’m a bit hesitant of blanket rules, because this is pretty much censorship, right? A lot of kids, especially those who are queer or struggling with their family or seeking community, are able to find safe spaces online. And if we take away all internet access for them, aren’t we taking this away too? But I am cognizant of us needing to build healthy offline spaces for children, because the internet is harming them in a lot of ways. I think soft social media regulation needs to happen, but alongside it, we need stronger advisories, access to help and resources, parental sensitisation, keeping schools screen-free, building better public infrastructure etc.From silent reading clubs to distraction-free devices, Gen Z is now going analogue amid an epidemic of disconnection. Is this a fad or a phenomenon that’s here to stay?Both, I think. There is definitely a serious generational reckoning with what the internet has done to us, and that’s making us reconsider our relationship with our devices. I love that we’re ‘touching grass,’ seeking and building offline communities and engaging with physical hobbies. But I think there’s an element of consumerism that has crept in – expensive ticketed events marketed as screen-free, for instance, or a push to purchase multiple devices to ‘fix’ our digital balance. I think these are just a fad – you can’t fix a generational transformation with a device bought on Amazon. But the former – communities, hobbies, mental nourishment – are here to stay.Last year, an Indian content creator’s death sparked conversations about the pressures of online visibility. What is the real cost of digital fame today—especially for women who are public-facing online? Women have always been vilified, objectified, abused – both online and offline – as well as forced to perform and strive for unattainable standards. Online visibility, hence, impacts us differently than it impacts men. (I want to add that non-cisgender people face a different and very horrible experience of abuse, discrimination, and harassment online, too). We’ve seen this happen time and again in how the internet piles upon women, mass harassment and abuse faced by women who dare to speak up, we’ve seen women activists and journalists hounded and threatened, and all kinds of abuse – sexist, casteist, classist, fat-phobic, you name it – directed at women. For creators, the pressures of an unstable industry that hinges on public engagement come into play. The desire to stay relevant, achieve financial success, hit the numbers you want to, all come into play, and the average Indian creator is so, so young. This is an unregulated industry, and I’ve observed first-hand the stresses a young creator, specially women, can face. We need stricter rules in terms of payments, abuse reporting online etc. but we also need more community support and care.Do you think social media and tech, including dating apps, are as liberating as they are believed to be?No, of course not – the same fissures and inequalities that exist offline also manifest online in a variety of ways. This ranges from what visual aesthetics are seen as cool or desirable, to who gets to be ‘famous’, to how abuse finds its own vocabulary online. I do think there is room for individuals to be liberated by social media and tech – there are many ‘success stories’ of people finding inter-caste love online, for instance, or queer people finding community, or women finding the language to understand their oppression – but structurally, these tools reinforce more than they empower. Individual change must also be accompanied with societal reform, but algorithms and tech tools often solidify existing hierarchies – specially with how corporates and big tech companies use these platforms to push certain kinds of narratives, or to shadowban, or as we see in the case of Elon Musk and X, control discourse.In countries like Nepal and Bangladesh, Gen Z has spearheaded protests around corruption, transparency and accountability. How does Indian Gen Z’s political engagement compare?We can’t look at ‘Indian Gen Z’ as a monolith – much like every other generation here, there are people who are politically aware and engaged, and there are those who are not. There has been mass collectivization and protests around things like air pollution in Delhi recently, for instance. But there is also a systematic suppression of dissent by the state, and persecution of activists, that contributes to a sense of fear.In a world sorted into silos by algorithms, can collective action survive?I have hope. I have seen multiple successful cases of online mobilization leading to actual ground-level movements. We do see the impact of algorithms, shadowbans, and suppression of certain political movements, but there are enough collective causes which we all need to unite on – I see climate change as being one of the most pressing issues of our generation that we desperately need action on.Speaking of action, how do we reclaim agency in the doom scrolling ecosystem designed to encourage passivity?Ah, the big question! I think the first step needs to be to reckon with and understand what the internet does. This book is a step in that direction. We then need to find offline, non-algorithmic spaces where we convene with real humans, find social community, and engage away from Big Tech and internet platforms that warp us. I think we also need to hold on to our hope for a better internet – giving up is what they want us to do – and create our spaces on the internet however we can. Closed groups, channels, online circles – pockets of curiosity and humanity can still persist. Pockets that force us to engage more, engage deeply, and find genuine connection and feeling. You write: “The most meaningful form of intelligence today is not recall, it is response.” That’s a meditation of what ‘intelligence’ means in a world where knowledge is at our fingertips due to the internet. The pedestalization of information recall and rote/memory in our education system feels obsolete at a time when we don’t necessarily need to ‘know’ everything – we can just look it up. How do we then define ‘intelligence’? I find that ‘response’ – which is the skill of knowing what to do with the knowledge we have – and pattern-based critical thinking and analysis are some foundations of intelligence in today’s ‘post-knowledge- era. This is an interesting conversation to have in light of AI as well – with people increasingly using AI for work, with even students relying on these tools for homework and learning, how is that going to change our conceptions of ‘intelligence’?Finally, what’s one Gen Z trend or trope/misconception you’d like to retire, and one internet trend you think deserves a comeback?I think older people have a tendency to look at Gen Z as a monolith – either we are all too frivolous, or we all take ourselves too seriously, or we all don’t care about the world, or we all are too focused on our mental health. This is reductive and shallow. This needs to go, and make room for more nuanced conversations around the diversities of this generation. An internet trend I’d love to see come back is ‘hopecore’ – I feel we all need some hope in our lives right now.
