9.12 ‘Is This Instagrammable?’ And Other Online Crises ft. Ria Chopra

If you decided to go analogue this year but still find yourself doomscrolling at 2 a.m., then this episode is for you.

In this latest episode, Tara sits down with Ria Chopra, writer, influencer, and Youth Advisor to Google, to unpack what it really means to grow up with the internet, how it builds identity, memory, relationships and sometimes completely messes with all of it in her debut book, “Never Logged Out.” 

Ria dives into the rebirth of antiquated notions of love through dating apps alongside the rise of trad wife content and femininity gurus. And then she questions the new norm for weddings and proposals, where we put on a show thanks to our ‘panopticon gaze’, trying to make it all ‘Instagram worthy.’

Ria also gets honest about what it means to build a writing career online, navigating how much of your life (and the lives of people around you) becomes content and how to stay authentic without feeling like you’re ‘selling your soul’ to the algorithm.

Finally, they touch on some trends that might shape us, including AI influencers with millions of followers, the analogue revival (trend or genuine shift?), and why extreme gender polarisation online is something we should be paying closer attention to.

Press play, and then maybe pause to check how you're actually using the internet.

Books and documentaries mentioned in this episode: 

1. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
2. Don’t Date Me, I’m Dalit by Christina Dhanraj
3. Algo Speak by Adam Aleksic
4. Inside the Manosphere by Louis Theroux (2026)

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms. 

Transcript

0:00

Like you can't train women to embrace their divine feminine and be like these passive players in a relationship and then expect stuff like this to not happen. Hi everyone, let me start with a question for you all. Have you ever paused mid-scroll and thought what even is the internet anymore? I have because on the one hand it's this incredible space where we learn, connect and on the other hand it's this absurd place full of these curated realities, misinformation and a lot of brain rot and if you're someone who says every second day I'm going to delete Instagram and then somehow ends up do scrolling for two hours, this episode is for you because today we're trying to make sense of all of this with Rhea Chopra who's written her debut book Never Logged Out and that looks at how the internet shapes Gen Z, how it builds identity, memory, relationships and sometimes completely messes with all of it from asking why our memories are now public archives to why algorithms refuse to let us move on from our exes. I really like this book because it's equal parts cultural analysis and also your lived experience Rhea which I found really fascinating and we've known each other for a few years now and Rhea is also part of the Bound Publishing course and you've probably come across her work on Instagram, Invogue, Vice, Buzzfeed, Hindu, Quint, you name it and you've probably seen her breakdown internet culture and Gen Z behaviour while you were scrolling. So welcome Rhea, very happy to talk to you about your book today. Thank you so much Tara, I'm also very excited to be here. Just for anyone watching, I mean Bound was one of the first platforms for writers that I collaborated with. I was very conscious when I started writing freelance with all of these publications that I was only able to do it because a bunch of people had guided me and whatever I learned along the way I sort of wanted to disseminate it to people. So I think I did like an AMA on Bound stories way back when I was not like a creator, I was just a freelance writer writing the things that I wanted to write and after that of course we've collaborated a bunch of times for like the Bound Publishing course and other things. So it's been nice to have watch you grow as I have also grown and I've watched this podcast of course, I love the way you talk to writers and I'm so excited. Thank you so much Rhea, I think yeah and I got to know about you because you were doing a course on freelance writing and that time I wanted to publish a lot in publications and that course actually really helped me out a lot because after that I you know actually did write for a few publications and it's hard work you know pitching and thinking of stories and keeping on doing this but coming to the book you know what really struck me is that what you said you know you grew up with the internet and at some point you logged in and you never logged out and your internet when you were growing up was a place that was a very playful world where people are actively trying to engage with the internet, you talk about video games, you talk about chats, messenger chats and somewhere along the way the internet has changed from becoming something we actively engage with to something that is very passive and you're sitting right in the middle of this, you're not just observing Gen Z internet culture, you are a part of it, you're part of creating it. So you know I wanted to ask you how do you personally balance being online as a participant and stepping back as an observer and how do you stop yourself from getting pulled into every rabbit hole that you are analysing? I think it's a couple of things, first of all I don't think I've always been the healthiest with my relationship with the internet, also the book has a few instances of me talking about things that have affected me badly like the internet, things that have affected me badly and how I have behaved in bad ways, facilitated or almost encouraged by the internet but even in the last few years as my presence has grown as a creator and posting more there's always from time to time problems that I've had, most of it is just literally feeling my brain rot because of the amount of short form content that I've been consuming and then also feeling like I have to create in order to gain my audience as a writer because it's very hard to break out into the mainstream as a writer if you either don't come from a lot of privilege or connections or some kind of background or then if you have a leadership established for yourself. So for me even that is like there's almost this bugging need to keep posting but then also a desire to log off from time to time. I've stayed thankfully reasonably healthy in the last few years by one hanging on to all the analogue hobbies that I have. I'm a quizzer which is by nature an offline activity, you're not allowed to use your phone when you're quizzing so every Sunday or you know every fortnightly Sunday I have like three to four hours of time where I'm literally not looking at my phone and my brain is still being used by like the questions that I'm seeing so that is lovely. I do a lot of Sudoku so that's an hour of time in the morning where I'm either not logged in at all because I'm doing it in the paper or I'm doing it on my phone but it's a healthy way of being used. I think writing about the internet can get bad pretty fast but it can also be good because if everything that you're consuming you're looking at it from a critical point of view then you're not passively consuming. It's still making you think about something. So I try to think about what I see a lot more instead of just doing the doomsday thing. Of course I fall into that trap from time to time also but yes I try to keep it as balanced as possible. Just another thing I feel like this journey of the internet being a playful, happier place back when we were younger people have told me it's like a little bit rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and all of it. Of course it is right but I also think the amount of content that is available online now is so much more than what it used to be. A lot of it is also just things to see like we've seen a boom of video, mostly short-form video and hence you see lesser interactive say websites or stuff that they think about how little we click on things anymore. It's just the scroll. So that choosing ability to decide where to go down which rabbit hole, I think that has been removed. Of course the amount of commerce that has come onto the internet which is the internet influencer marketing, the way advertisers are using platforms to advertise to you, even the fact that your data is being stored and being monetised off of. If I search for one thing on Google I am going to see ads about it on Instagram and that makes me feel like shit because I know they're all sharing my data and all of it. So I think all of these feelings have contributed to this horrible feeling most of us have when we use the internet today and yet we can't stop ourselves from doing it. So my book is one narrative. It has a lot of culture commentary and resources, research stats etc. I engage with other writers a lot but I wanted to put in my personal experience a lot also because I think I've had a fairly average internet experience growing up. People like me have had a similar trajectory. Of course it's a very upper class urban reality of the internet but those of us who exist in this reality and that's also a large percentage of us would have had a similar trajectory and hence a similar feeling the way that I've had. So the personal anecdotes are meant to illustrate and it's resonating with people. I think people like that flavour of this not just being academic, not just being research but it being a personal story also. So I am the microcosm and the internet is the microcosm and all of us are as a generational microcosm and this is one of those journeys. But of course Never Locked Out is not the be all and all of Indian internet books. I am looking forward to more people writing about their journeys, people who've had different journeys than mine. I love looking at and talking to creators and even people who are not creators who've had a different kind of internet experience and some of it is not as beautiful or as happy as what mine used to be. Many people that I've spoken to even in the course of writing my book but also etc only got the internet post geo or close to that tipping point when the entirety of India finally got internet access. So it's nice to see all of these different narratives coexist and it enriches I think all of our understanding of what the internet is, who we are as a generation and where we may go from here. I want to figure out you know how did this book come to me because this book is about Gen Z and maybe even for Gen Z and for me it was a very distinct experience also reading it because I'm a millennial. But I related to a lot of it and I was very curious about your relationship with the internet as well because you love the internet but at the same time you're also very critical of it and critical of you know content that just comes our way without as you said analysing it. So what is the main thing that you want the reader to take away from your book? I think I want more people to not be passive about the way we engage with the internet and what writing this book helped me realise and I hope it helps dealers realise as well is that so much change and transformation has happened to us non-consensually because of our internet rules. Like many of us have not realised the ways in which psychologically, socially, behaviourally we as individuals we are changing because of the way we engage with the internet and the more I wrote the more I realised that I wasn't so comfortable with some of these things and I'm now putting systems in place and changing my habits a little bit in order to remedy it. So at least when I'm using the internet I'm active in thinking about what this can do to me and what it means for us as a society etc. So I just hope that anyone who reads it that's what that's the point the book ends on you know like you have to pay attention to what is happening to you because if you don't that is I mean attention is love is something that I think about a lot. So it's if you don't pay attention to yourself and what the world is doing to you like you're not seeing yourself enough and you're not loving yourself enough but also it's I think a social political question now to at least be aware of what you're doing and what these big tech forces are doing to you. So for me like people being just more thoughtful more mindful of their internet use and thinking more about what they're doing would be the ideal aim of this book. That makes a lot of and when I was reading this book I also thought of another book it's called The Anxious Generation. I'm not sure if you're yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so I found it very interesting because especially I would want to know your relationship with the internet because I know you really love the internet but also you are critical of it and that really comes out I think in the love chapter where you have a lot of interesting examples like our relationships and that's an anti-dating app stuff though honestly. It is and it's like oh how much do you love me will you peel this orange for me or you know there's all these viral reels that are designed to test how much your partner loves you and you kind of break that apart and say that you know there's so much more context and these reels or these viral things that people get influenced by they're completely taken out of context and they're subconsciously having an impact on us and I was having a conversation with you know some of my friends the other day on this whole Andrew Tate thing and what it's doing to young boys and you know this whole conversation on masculinity so can you I think you'd be a better person to explain you know how has the internet sort of commodified love in a way and I really like how you even ended the chapter which is like you said you know just love yourself so can you explain you know what your thought process was? I think that's a very very broad question because there are so many things to talk about specifically even when we talk about love and its intersections with the internet. Dating apps obviously is one thing and that's what most of my chapter focusses on. The first one is the dating apps in terms of being able to give you your partner of choice and how in reality you're pretty much just another consumer for a corporate firm trying to profit off of you. Apps like this at least when they started coming to India was seen almost as liberal in mindset and that they had the ability to liberate you and maybe this was a progressive thing to do etc but what we've seen in a lot of ways and especially in a society like India is that while dating apps might enable you to break out of social hierarchies by meeting people from different religions or regions or castes or other social hierarchies that we have in society, the possibility of those unions actually being socially accepted is very very low because these apps are detached from the real truth which is that the rest of India is not as progressive as the apps themselves. So there's a context less mess to these apps and I've drawn upon the work of Christina Dhanraj who's a Dalit writer and she has this essay about Don't Date Me, I'm Dalit. She talks about how even if apps enable people from across castes or across religions to meet, will their families accept their union and if we see a successful union as the one leading to marriage, will Indian society accept that marriage and look at what is happening in India politically today. So there's a lot of contradictions in terms of how internet notions of love and internet enabled platforms for love or that claim to help you find love actually interact with socio-political realities. I mean and I'm not saying it's all bad, I think even dating apps for that matter have helped women break out of or at least talk to potential partners without their families getting to know which is a huge thing because in India as a girl if you're seen talking to the opposite sex or what would be like the same sex you know for the romantic thing, that would be a huge problem. So there's an enablement of personal freedoms within these apps but there is a social reality that they sometimes tend to ignore which is the point that I make in the book. I also think that they further hierarchies or further solidify the hierarchies that they already have in terms of being very visual in nature so people who just look good in their pictures or were able to make up a good pickup line or stuff like that. Once again these are interactions happening entirely out of context you know like how a person looks may have no bearing on who they are as a partner but these apps expect us to rely on it for the same reason and that is why I equate them to what we consider the antiquated notion of arranged marriage which is like a list your bio data so you pick your partner and we think that the arranged marriage system is very backward but dating apps are the what is what else is different in them you know. So my goal was to draw the attention of the reader to these realities. I think another thing that I want to talk about within the realm of love being not commodified but I want to say contentized. On the internet you pointed out the Manosphere and this whole inside culture and these people like Andrew Tate etc were talking to young men about you know you should subjugate women etc. But I think there's a huge section of content that's also catering to women and some of it is trad wife content that we see now which is like serve your husband once again very like amenable to Indian realities right because trad wife content is not just content for us so it is a reality a lot of us have seen and I think a few like one two generations before us have rebelled against and now it's a little weird to see people younger than me making trad wife content on the internet and then there's this whole I don't know if you're on the side of like YouTube that I'm on but for research purposes but also just out of interest I sometimes look at these videos where you have these femininity gurus. The wizard Liz was one of them and there was this huge scandal last year not scandal but basically she makes videos catering to women about how to be attractive to men and you know very confident like own your divine feminine and be in your soft power they call it something like feminine softness and you know dark femininity and or there's all of these words that pretty much mean that you need to be like the receiver and the man needs to be like the provider and you have to be the nurturer which is a very antiquated once again notion of what gender relations are supposed to be which she had a pretty public incident of her fiance and baby daddy cheating on her so there was this huge thing last year where people were like if you make the guru content and then this is happening to you what does that say and obviously it says what a critical viewer would know anyway which is that much of this content is a sham like you can't train women to embrace their divine feminine and be like these passive players in a relationship and then expect stuff like this to not happen so of course i'm interested in the content that's catering to men also but i'm so much more interested in the content that is catering to women because it's i think easier to tell people to oppress how do you brainwash people into you deserve to be oppressed or that you deserve to be the subjugated in your relationship and that is a pretty like that is what much of this content is doing like how do you have tell women or like gaslight women into believing that you should not financially work like financially be independent you should not work you should just like take care of the kids and do child care and all your identity is what you derive from the man etc so i find that pretty pretty interesting something that i'm really enjoying these days once again is this thing of dating apps having a little bit accepted that we saw a fall in dating downloads over the last couple of years so there's a movement of them going out of fashion people in general when they meet when they commune physically there's that whole movement that you're seeing of touch grass and you know go to concerts and go to a supper club so that's also percolated into online dating and a lot of people are just tired because they've realised that these apps don't work for them so i'm seeing a lot of dating apps do physical meetups like bumble collaborating with nike to do like a singles run event tinders done physical meetups it's very interesting to me that a dating app whose entire premise was physically is now being like so this whole contradiction has also been pretty interesting for me to see but there's a lot more to talk about in the realm of love couple influencers are people that i'm very interested in especially because now i'm at an age where instagram has flagged me as like marriageable so i get a lot of marriage content regularly so um the instagramification of weddings is things that i'm very um interested in seeing like there's so uh it's and you know there's stuff in weddings that you can see is being done for the reels like there are people um uh like the bride and groom are doing a trend etc so i really like observing and like instagram in particular has made its way to weddings also there's one kind of love on the internet that i really like which is when there are interviewers who go in like a khan market or in a good girl cyber hub or something to people who look like couples and they're like how did you meet and what is your story and sometimes there'll be a really old couple with a really sweet story that is like the one kind of love content that i really like yeah i find that well there's one specific guy who does it in khan market also i forgot his name but his wheels keep popping up on my feed uh yeah but like you know it just makes you think what you said right to think critically about how the internet affects our lives and how what we're seeing affects our psychology because oftentimes we don't really think about that i think even i've been free to that right um at there was a point in time when i was watching a lot of these productivity deals and looking in that and then i realised that you know over consumption of these deals which are supposed to help you in personal growth or self-growth is also toxic in a way so to analyse that kind of thing is very important and especially what you said you know like with the wedding thing if people think that oh weddings have to be this huge tamasha nowadays i have to spend money it's become kind of like norm like you have to you know sabi sachi or spend that kind of money on your wedding because that is your husband has to cry when you walk because i went to nisa mangaldas's podcast and i had told her we were talking about something similar and i told her how i am seeing a lot of proposal content on my instagram also now and i mean like they flagged me as being wedding age so i just keep getting served a lot of uh wedding and uh in case my boyfriend is watching this so um there's this certain kind of discourse that emerged on tiktok and has now percolated to instagram which is it's called basically tell your boyfriend to not do the lobster pose when they're proposing or send this your boyfriend to remind him to not do the lobster pose when you're proposing which is that we've seen when you propose and like the guy is down on one knee and is like doing uh holding up the ring to you so you know many of us have like a little hunch now because we're on our phones already so like you know you you can do like this but you have to remind your man to do like this so he looks good in the pictures right otherwise the pictures are going to be bad so just think of send this to your boyfriend so that he's not hunched over in the picture like it's very but i mean i'm getting proposed to should i be thinking about how my partner's back is going to look in the proposal pictures which is under the assumption that there is a photographer hidden somewhere who's also taking pictures or making a reel of the moment etc so this thing of us having started viewing ourselves through and i call this the panopticon gaze in my book where i say that we consider this audience as as real as being watched all the time but uh it shows up in trends like this and in conversations like this there's an assumption photograph or you know post i'm not saying like people should not want their pictures to look good or whatever but there's we have to at least think about what they say like we're so subsumed in a culture of images now you have to think about that you have to think about aesthetics and i think it's something that we should be talking about more just this impact of image culture on not just romance but all spheres of our life even productivity content for instance i have a hard time thinking that someone who made a youtube reel or a youtube video out of a day in my productive life or be productive with was actually productive during that day because i have tried to meet you know spend one day with me as a writer writing her first book you know writing to 14 years then because you have to be careful that your pen or like your laptop looks good you have to go to the right cafe with the right background so that the typing video of you comes out great i i don't know how many of these productivity gurus are actually getting work done when they make those youtube videos so um there's a lot of contradictions and and yet a lot of people consume them thinking oh this creator is the most productive person in the world and i should take tips from them so we should just be putting question marks on everything is what i think I think the visual culture it impacts all of us you know and when it doesn't happen then there's a disappointment like if the proposal doesn't happen then you will feel disappointed because there's no pictures there's no evidence and i keep thinking back to like our grandparents time and they got married and there's no pictures of their marriage or whatever you know and they just went on with their life um but i want to talk about the title never logged out because it really captures this feeling that you said right the panoptic feeling that we're always surveilled we're always online even if we're technically offline we are online we're not really out of the internet it follows us in the conversations relationships how we think about ourselves all of that stuff and there's a very interesting anecdote in the book where you said the internet has changed even memory and you talk about your your manchester united thing and you said the internet is not designed to forget things even though we are so to you what does never logged out mean and if you don't mind can you tell the listeners a little bit about your manchester united thing because i found that an interesting way to discuss never so many people get in touch with me about their manchester united things because everyone has like something but i'll come to the title first and then we can go to the manual thing i've had a lot of manual fans also tell me wow manual mentioned which is like quite funny to see so never logged out is technically the fifth sixth title i think that we had and i'm happy to talk about the first title also which was the title of the original proposal for the book that i made now it's like three and a half four years back which is then the original and i was in conversation with another publisher and there's another publisher and then like use one i think so like you know i played around with the proposal for a very long time and obviously i grew and changed as a person i was so young back then when i was ambitiously proposals and all the other bit um much later is when i feel it uh reached a shape that a publisher was actually willing to take a bet on also but the original title was screen played my idea was that the book starts with a playful internet which is that we were playing with screens and we are meant to play with screens but they ended up playing us back in that slang sense bit uh chirag my editor who's um handed my book and bloomsbury um when i sent him my proposal he replied within like hours and he was like i want this i want to commission you but we have to change the title because this sounds like a film book which is true like screenplays are you know you wouldn't get the pun first you would get the screenplay sense first so then we bounced around a bunch of titles i really wanted i'm a literature student and i love like the references obviously the cover itself is also a reference not even a reference it's pretty clear uh inspired from uh michelangelo's creation um painting which is on the ceiling of the sistine chapel but um so i i suggested a title with a greek reference and then there was another it was shakespeare reference chirag had gotten back with some titles and all this time i was writing the book also and then finally we were at the finished manuscript and i was reading through it and there's a line in the book that goes one day we logged on to the internet and then we never logged out which is the cusp of the moment and that's technically how i define the generation that i'm writing about if you read the first chapter i refute commonly proposed uh definitions of the agency or the millennials saying that chronological age is not the only thing we should be looking at especially in a country like india where our internet exposure has been so varied so you know even when you said at the beginning of the recording today that you're a millennial and i'm a genzy but you still found a lot of it relatable because many of us have been on the same internet i mean chronologically ages big group so for me the leadership of this book is that cusp of people who remember a little bit before the internet and then one day you never logged out and now we are what we are today and of course that's because of like uh wi-fi and cheap data and personal devices which are smartphones that enable you to never never log out but that then became a very catchy line that was the hook of the book and like the the specific definition that we were looking at so then we picked up never logged out and then we put it um as the title and obviously it's a very chronically online thing also to be never logged out and like you said it's not just about the internet act of logging in and logging out it's the fact that even when i'm not on my phone i'm thinking in reels or the song that i heard in a video is playing in my head so you've been never logged out mentally physically in any way so that became the title i have to talk about the subtitle also which is about how the internet uh created india's gen z we wanted to hope that this is an india specific book because a lot of writing uh that we consume about the internet actually comes from the west and this is of course i talk about larger philosophies and i engage with a lot of western thinkers also but this is a book rooted in the indian internet experience so we wanted that to come out if not in the title then in the subtitles so we kept that obviously it's a little hyperbole in saying how the internet created india's gen z like i talk about a specific group of people and this is not a whole generation no one can write you know like a story of a whole generation and there are other things i play in india also that create us as people like it's not just the internet but this book aims to trace the internet's role for that group so that then became our subtitle now coming to the majesty united um incident which is what the chapter uh eternal sunshine has as its uh opening so i have this thing where um i once dated a guy who was a huge fan of manchester united and i am not a football fan so i spent weeks months googling football in general and manchester united in particular so that i could learn more about my partner's interest and then eventually we broke up and i deleted a lot of our pictures and you know his uh whatsapp chat is gone but for some reason my google search just does not forget the fact that i was heavily searching manchester united at some point of time so even today whenever there's a manchester united match for instance or there's some new news like the player has changed or the coach has changed i get that as a google news alert and no matter how many times i mark myself not interested on manchester united and i've removed it from my cached data in my google my phone just keeps showing me manchester united um notifications about matches again and again and that then became the hook of a chapter and you know the incident came first and the idea of the chapter emerged upon it later because i realised that it's not just a google news alert for some people it's google photos showing you a memory of you know this day seven years ago and it's you with a friend who's not your friend anymore or it's facebook memories of a period of time in your life that you'd rather forget or it's instagram memories now that show you something that you don't want to see so this idea that we focus so much i think on memory as a virtue especially in india and of course that's important and i'm not saying that's not but uh forgetting is such an essential part of the human experience in a lot of ways almost a defence mechanism built into us to allow us to move on in life and things that we'd rather forget and to let go of information that is not relevant to us anymore and the internet with its clinical mechanical memory entirely repudiates that instinct of forgetting it doesn't let us forget the things that we'd rather forget it will keep dropping reminders at the worst times of things that you don't want to be reminded of and this um how this is at odds with our natural ability as human beings uh that is what the chapter aims to look at and of course then it also looks at the impact of a digital footprint at large and why people are talking about the right to be forgotten as an essential human right so many of us have digital footprints from when we were minors and we were not using the internet properly and would you not rather have yourself forget some of that but also have the internet forget uh those parts of you so that conversation was something i was aiming to highlight in that chapter i think it's really struck a chord with many of us who were who have been on the internet from a very very young age because we one have that footprint as a horrible reminder not always but in some ways an unpleasant reminder of the things that we were doing uh back then and we all have our manchester united you know we all have that thing we'd rather forget but so all of these things i think are uh interesting to think about in terms of how our memory is being reshaped and then of course there's a section on death and how we want to be remembered and how people remember us and how people engage with our digital footprint after we uh which i also thought was quite uh essential for me to put in because many people who are dying now and those of us who will die will leave our digital footprint like sometimes i think about it like i hope they read the book uh but will they also watch the reels like will they look me up and find some shitty old thing that i tweeted who knows you know so it's an interesting thing to think about yeah i found that chapter very very interesting because i think about it a lot as well you know uh it's become so much harder to break up with someone also as you mentioned because they just randomly will come on your swiggy and your zomato all of these things and i sometimes think about you know all of these baby influencers like parents who are influencers and they're they're putting the baby pics up online and the baby's walking and everything i wonder what the baby's gonna think when they grow up would they want that content out there or um we've seen this before with child actors who have grown up and then had very unpleasant stories of how they were forced by their parents to labour to earn money for the family or they were forced into situations that they should not have been forced into or made to overwork themselves on this school and i feel we're seeing that happen again with uh kid influencers now especially in india like i'm sorry to say but some parents are really putting their kids like dancing children and girls young little girls dancing on songs that they should not be dancing to wedding teams and they should not be wedding and i'm not talking about like 15 16 year olds i'm talking about like 7 8 year olds and you know their parent has shot the video and they put it up there and then you read the comments and you know what's going on and yet it's happening i feel like instead of this whole con i mean we should still be having this whole conversation about banning social media for kids but what about making it a safer place for kids like where are the rules about not making content of minors where are the laws about not putting children on the internet like those are the things we should be looking for and yet you don't see that conversation happen Yeah and now there's this whole other thing that's coming up like grief tech where you can even sort of like ai can have simulate conversations of you and your loved ones who've passed away so there's all of these things happening with our identity and identity is fragmenting into sort of internet AI where we sort of lose control of it and there was a very interesting incident that you write about where in the book where you were at a pride parade and you were just showing up you're being present and then your photo was taken by someone and it was so circulated in the media and it was even used commercially without your consent right and and it struck me as very ironic because you're in a space that's all about identity and consent and yet your image is taken and used without it um so how do we deal like how do you deal with that loss of control how do we deal with that loss of control i think to me it's a little like i have already compromised on my privacy in some way by putting my life and my opinions online uh so the and this is a shitty thing to say but the fact that it was done to me by someone else also does not feel and you know from time to time it happens in other ways like someone will take a screenshot of your three years and then put it up on some other platform and say a certain thing like all of that i feel like um it didn't but it doesn't now bother me as much on an emotional level and it was only later that i started wondering like what if i was a closeted teenager and i was 18 years old right i could have been underage also and thankfully i have progressive parents who knew where i was and who know uh like what are the things i believe in and who i am as a person so i mean they like it wasn't a cause of concern at home but if a closeted young person was out at a factory and their picture was like put in the papers and it got blown up to such an extent and is being sold like profited off of they would have had troubles at home like you have domestic violence and physical abuse being done to kids for much less right so um that loss of control is something that i think about a lot more now when i think about like kids who are being profited off of against their content uh against their consent or um even like relationship content where one person is clearly into it much more so than the other and you wonder if they break up and we've seen this instance these things happen where an influencer marries a regular person and then they divorce and then from time to time that regular person keeps coming up on you know online forums or discussion it's like oh that person has married someone else and it's that this is a conversation i have been my partner a lot who's a very very private person so we constantly negotiate how much of him is put up on my profile how much of my family uh my sister has a kid now so like i am not sharing that on my socials at all i put i put very little of my family uh on my social media now i used to put a lot of it before because increasingly the more my social media visibility grows the more these questions of what are people in association like what i'm trying to say is when you have to give up my life like and not to not in a bad way like i'm okay putting my life up there but it is the life of the people around me that i'm so much more concerned about and i'm such a small scale creator like i'm not even at 100k right you think about people with millions of followers um and what it feels like to be in their orbit or be in the family or friends and like what that does and i meet these creators sometimes i get invited to agency parties or like creator events and there are very interesting conversations that emerge out of there and every creator when they get a little thoughtful they'll tell you that they still think about what life would have been like if they had not put so much of their life out there because sure they make money and it's very glamorous but it can be a psychologically shattering experience to put so much of yourself out there that you're not even sure who you are as a person how much of it is performance like how much of it is really you so these questions like what it does to you what it does to people around you other things i'm so much more interested in there are the social political ramifications of it also like do um do people deserve to profit off of other people's images without their consent and we can like go into that debate also but i have always been much more interested in the individuals and human behaviour so what happens to people who do it and to people whom it is done to is what my attention is on I really like the way that you've grown your profile because as you said you know uh you you curated it in a way that you talk about internet culture you talk about gen z you talk about topics that are relevant to us and you are very personal as well but i i do see that on your profile you are protecting uh people and you don't put too much of you know that uh even your partner i don't know i don't want to know also because you're not comfortable but yeah because there are parts of my life that are not up for consumption and i think this is also something that um it can be specific to niche also like i see lifestyle influencers for instance whose uh life is now uh a way of making content that you would make content at a family member's wedding or at someone's wedding like my sister got married i'm not making content at her wedding so i also i think for me maybe it was because one i'd always been on the internet so i had seen examples of people making one or the other kinds of content and i was always thinking about it also i wasn't passively consuming so i could see the harms and like the pros and cons of what kind of niche requires what kind of um you know uh self um what broadcasting and like letting people into your life and then when i started posting a lot more it was because i could see that in the best and i always look to uh what happens in the internet culture scene for inspiration for what will happen in india in a few years because we're always we used to be around five seven years behind them in terms of internet culture trends now we're only one two years behind them because things are just um it's fed up so i could see a lot of journalists trying to establish their video presence a lot of writers trying to establish their video presence uh because of tiktok there and the huge uh uptake of tiktok then um the way uh were gravitating towards video more so than writing and i realised that if i wanted to be a journalist and i didn't want to be a journalist um i worked in a newsroom it was just not a psychologically pleasant experience for me in terms of i realised i can't handle that work so i moved towards culture writing which is a more an essays which are a slower form of writing which i like um but yeah like once i saw enough people who i read uh start moving to video or at least having a video presence or a social presence i realised that i should start doing that too because if i wanted to be a writer five ten years down the line and this is five years ago so five years down the line i mean it worked for me uh i and i have people now who come to lit fest that i'm at who ask me this question of you know if um i want to be a writer if i want to be any kind of creative should i have a social media presence i've heard book deals film so um my answer is like i didn't even put up enough of a fight i was you know i didn't even think about this maybe that was because i was comfortable with social media on the internet i'm okay with it i was anyway posting you know for a smaller group now i'm posting for a larger group so one that is there but if you do think about building a following on social media as an artist who wants to primarily operate in another medium and then your social media is just your uh funnel for building audience who will then be channelised to your other work then make sure your socials reflect the work that you do like i think by a lot of my readers are now buying my book is because the same exact things i talk about online are the things that i also write about and have always written about so there's a resonance in terms of the same kind of people gravitating towards me that also means my growth is slow if i was making like makeup content or fashion or dancing any of these other more visual things i would have had a much larger audience you know and that can work out for you in other ways like i'm not saying that um i'm not passing judgement on what methods other people do but uh i would not have been comfortable by having that kind of audience and then me writing so um maybe even if you think about developing your social media presence uh stay true to the themes that are your focus of work and that you resonate with for instance there's this guy that i really like etymology nerd uh whose content um comes on my instagram he has a linguistics degree from harvard and his research specialises in how social media is changing language and linguistics and how people talk so um he started he blew up on twitter no on tiktok really really fast and then on instagram as well and he used to make these videos talking about how certain slang came about yeah why we have a certain inflexion of speaking why do all influencers speak in that you know the hi guys sort of a blah blah blah and then he had a book come out last year about he called it i'll go speak which is about how algorithms are changing the way that we speak so there's a resonance here between the content that they make and then the things that they post so i think these kinds of content like this is all right i'm at peace with what i make and how i make it but um for some other people it might not you know uh be okay so you have to make your own choices then i think that's a very compelling thing i remember i find that very fascinating that a lot of your viewers now followers are buying the book because yeah i do see that on your profile like you're talking about a lot of things that you're writing about and you're primarily using that as a way to spread your ideas rather than you know trying to be a lifestyle influencer and then writing about something completely different and there's a there's a dissonance um but i am actually very interested because i was going to ask you you know we're speaking about loss of control and putting yourself online and now i've understood a bit of your motivation behind uh being so online and i'm actually finding you one of the most honest influencers if i can call you an influencer that's because you are my friend so i'm being very honest when i go in public i'm media trained i think people should see an honest look at what yeah and it's not all like because you see the following you see the you know the the lit fests and and all of those things but obviously you know i just want to know what are some of the biggest challenges for you being online and putting yourself online the way that you have so i struggle with a lot and it's um even if i have a relatively uh balanced relationship with social media you should look at my screen time it's like three hours look me like they don't believe me when i say that because it's a little less but i've really trained myself to not lose i have multiple tools in place i have one work phone which has my social media and then i have the other actual phone so work for me because i i want to draw those boundaries always so i'm doing everything i can to keep this healthy for me and despite that it does not work to a large extent first of course is this thing of always feeling the need to be relevant to have a hot take about what's being spoken about and i see this happen to myself also and i think i talk about this in the book that when there is a pressure to be the first person to post a reel about something or to be the first person with the hot take or the because if you're the first person to if you're the first person to say something in a certain way it goes up and then second or third action so in your quickness to say something you often chimp on research and you don't have as informed an opinion as you should have so you can be wrong in a lot of ways or you don't freeze things properly even on instagram if you want yourself to blow up your reels need to be under 1.5 minutes they have allowed us to make three-minute reels and the second three-minute reels but we prefer these and by we i mean like the alphabets that are shorter so you remove a lot of context and you don't say a lot of explanations you you know just make your opinion the shortest version of itself as possible and then you say it or you tweet it and tweets are anyway supposed to be shorter so you do that and i think the that opens the room to one like i said you misrepresenting yourself but also other people misunderstanding you right and that creates a lot of harm and a lot of confusion when either you said something you didn't mean to or other people think you are saying something you didn't mean to because you didn't mention a certain context or you're actually wrong maybe because you didn't do enough research to see it so if i'm going to be the first person to talk about how diljit dosanjh's mid-colour outfit is a tribute to the maharaja of which i did and it blew up i i still spent some time on that reel and i can't put everything in that video so that people are excluding me in the comments and that's important also but i could have also been so wrong like i could have i'm just taking that as an example right if today i'm going to make a reel about something that happened this morning i can get my numbers wrong i can get a name wrong i might not know the background story as much as i should have so um subset because you know like you will get that traction but um you can also just have a theory bad time with it so uh something that writing the book taught me and i like that more is that i'm theorised i'm organically a long-form person like i clearly like the process of writing the book also because there was no urgency like i knew what i was writing would only get published a year a year and a half down the line in fact interesting so i think there is uh of course being the first person to say something matters and having uh the ability to articulate yourself well in the moment is an important thing to have but there is also an importance to taking your time with saying something and taking the space that you have with something i mean if argument does is our word may get i missed you i mean it's gonna be okay by the reason even already because there is so much that i cannot remove context from and explain because it will be either taken wrongly or it will be misunderstood or it will just not convey the depth which i wish to convey so that is one like urgency culture is something i really struggle with because you see journalists who do the first ones to say something or just thinkers being the first one to say something and then they blow up right that's always a thing and you want to be that but you also don't want to be that so that's fun performativity is another not just performativity in the sense that you're faking being who you are but a desire to share every cool thing that happens to you every good thing that happens to you i feel like you should celebrate yourself and i totally do like people have um talked about me being extremely self-congratulatory on social media to which i said social media there is that but um i think some things are like i said not up for public consumption you know like it's okay if you don't post about it it's okay if you got engaged and you don't post it and there's a um you know that thing of if a tree fell in the forest but there was no one around to witness it like what does it mean so it's bad and you have to acquire the sense of identity that even if no one sees you it's okay and for those of us who post a lot and are used to validation and the congratulations and all of that uh we need to retrain ourselves to be okay even when the congratulations don't come though i will say that i am all for self-congratulatory behaviour and i'm hugely in favour of that especially for women brag about it people will have always told us to shut up and like you know come to come to core but uh so those are two things uh third thing as many people uh as like you there will be a one percent who don't like you so you have to i mean and that's you have to make your peace with that as well and uh that is one thing uh you have to not say yes to every brand collaboration like i will say that you have to be a little critical and um there are influencers who make a lot of money from social media so that can be very attractive especially because now i'm at a scale where brands are willing to pay me a lot of money and then to say no and be like either like i don't want to collaborate with you or i'm i'm not doing that interventions like you know there's also that thing so um making those choices can also be uh something you have to be very steadfast about i think for me personally this is something that i uh struggle a little bit with and it's in the book also where i talk about like how body image was a problem area for me for a period of time i think um video where you have to look at constantly and then there are filters that will make you look much better or just the desire to show up uh looking good and what does good mean it is adherence to social standards like smooth skin or like big eyes and like eyebrows are done there's no facial hair for women you're well dressed um it's especially after i hit 50k i think i started getting some comments like that because then you start going outside of your audience i used to have like this one dedicated person who used to comment like shit on every video of me like once i remember they put a bitchy real maybe yeah he better because i repeat like a lot of outfits it's like you know looking tired because i was not wearing culture in that video blah blah so i think you have to really one uh be confident in and just for women i don't think anyone talks to men this way but uh be confident in how you look because um i think teenage girls got to what image issues rate is sky high when it comes to social media but even those of us who are older like you're always susceptible to people saying something about how you look or you're ugly or like blah blah blah and then you have to make your peace with that and then i think second um to not pander to that like my idea is how i look is not relevant to my content so i am not going to be spending more than five minutes on it like i will do my basic colour earrings for my normally but true lipstick if i want to and like i am extremely privileged in the sense that the only identity marker that i can get abused about online is the fact that i'm a woman and sometimes men do like when you're doing educational content as a woman but people who belong to minority religions or gender identities that are non-cis or if you're um you know not speaking hindi probably like language different linguistics like look in the kind of regional abuse um religion-based abuse caste-based abuse that you see online and um i think there's like there are creators who are brave enough to just withstand all of that and i have a lot of respect for them also because even without all of that i have a very like long list of problems that i have with social media or it can get really really bad yeah but i i like how sort of you know you're very honest with yourself also about the challenges and it shows a lot of emotional maturity and you've also built a thick skin and you have your reasons like you know what you're trying to achieve with social media you see the benefits of it you're enjoying the benefits of it and you also know when to distance yourself so i think that's very emotionally mature and i also relate with the real thing because you know you never before have i really looked at myself so much i've also got these things that you know you're doing reels so you should dress up because i don't dress up you know and i you should do your hair you should do makeup because you're coming on these deals but it's not really about that for me uh so yeah i relate so what do you think now you know because you comment on internet where do you see the trends going now i feel there as a culture very interested i think the book is more about you know like that is one thing so i would in general like viewers who are not at the book yet but are still interested in internet culture if you just want a primer and a empathetic understanding of what young people who have grown up with the internet feel like i feel like the book is a good way to understand where we are now where do we go from is stuff that i have opinions about no one can categorically say i think my first thing would be um ai influencers which i have started seeing on my feed i'm going to slightly shake up the game because i've seen you know um i don't even want to call them people ai people if we can call it that with 500k 600k 1 million followers and they look extremely realistic i've seen lip sync videos i've seen dance videos i've seen pictures uh that look extremely real but are ai generated so um i think content that is based on how someone looks which can be like a person wearing a good outfit and then tagging all the brands or holding a certain bag and like tagging the brand or a dance reel i think stuff like that is a domain that ai influencers can potentially take a large chunk of viewership out of so if you're a creator who does that just that um your i don't know if that field is as stable as it has been or because for the past few years being a force-based creator or someone who buys things and wears them and looks good in them is a very lucrative thing to be uh but the second ai can just create that nice looking picture uh you there are brands are gonna opt for that instead so uh having a personality like if you want to be a creator having a personality really matters if you're a consumer not a creator then just look at who you're following like i have had mutuals with ai accounts where i've told my friends because they're extremely realistic so i think being more discerning about ai is something we as a consumer base have to build uh second thing that i'm seeing uh is this um insult type of rhetoric india maybe but i think we're gonna reach a huge huge point of gender uh polarisation or um extreme viewpoints with regards to gender coming in there's obviously a government that is conservative as a society we have always had those conservative uh views within us like mithya harki is deeply deeply seeped into every single part of indian culture but uh the way i see young boys talk to and about women online is extremely harrowing even for me to see and um you have our dc versions of um and repeat etc here already um there will be more i'm pretty sure of it um i see for research purposes i while writing the book thought that i would maybe want to do a gender chapter also so i joined a lot of men's only spaces like on reddit or in other places and the conversation like and there's those basic things and you have a 14 year old very confidently saying that i will marry someone with zero body count but i will have sex with a lot of women because i'm alpha like you know there's a thought of that you have very young boys participating in and being exposed to but there is stuff that is so much more explicit than that that is happening um and it intersects in india with communalism with um with with caste violence with a classism that we've always had in society with all of the officials that we have in india as a society intersect with this brand of discourse and i feel like it's i mean this is a shitty prediction for me as a woman to even have to say but i feel like um we're going to see a lot of that on the internet we're already seeing it and we're going to see more of that and there are creators who will shamelessly profit off of it we have multiple documentaries now abhi ek do hafte pehle netflix pe aaye hain louis theroux ke its called inside the manosphere where uh this journalist louis theroux he's pretty big he's done a lot of political uh documentary work he speaks to some people in your miami miami la um i think a couple of other places in the u.s which are the hubs of this inside manosphere sort of content he doesn't interview an andrew tate or someone but there's like a tier three sort of influencers that he is interviewing because they're the only ones who say yes to being on a documentary because they want their crowd and um you have these people knowing what they're doing is wrong and knowing that they're influencing very impressionable young people into shitty things and they will do it anyway because they want to block it and india may be like there are a lot of people who will uh sell you the betting app or the weird crypto and all of it and then they will also add a lot of masculinity um you know shitty content on top of it i think the third thing is that this um analogue shift conversation that we're seeing i think a lot of it is a trend uh in terms of the scale at which it is happening uh i think it's cool now to say that you're logging off touching but if it leads to people actually doing it i think there's a percentage of people within that will actually manage to build healthier habits so i'm looking forward to at least even a small change in how we engage with and on the internet i can already see myself genuinely separating myself from my online personalities and wanting to do more things physically and physical events also i don't want to post as much anymore because i'm i'm like okay i'm dressed up it's podcast event let's make a reel also let's do everything so um i think there is a rethinking at least as a generation that we are doing in terms of our internet use and um i mean if you want to think more about that you should read never logged out which is a very good book that might actually push you to also um mindfully think about your internet use but i i think it will yield good results even though i think a lot of yeah i agree with you and i sometimes think you know because gen z is really leading this whole analogue revolution and i kind of wish it happened you know 10 years ago because i've spent so much time on the internet uh and in my mid-30s and now i'm also trying to log off and go analogue and things like that i think being on the internet a lot rewires your brain as we've discussed and rewires your psychology um but really amazing insights and i think it's good but there's so much of ourselves that is on it and for those of us who are in creative spaces if there is no evidence of your work online and in certain kinds of jobs in these fields you have to know someone who knows someone who knows someone because that job is even publicly connected yeah exactly but having that balance i think you know which i think there's a movement towards now is very very useful and you know pushing yourself to sort of sometimes if you can uh and i was just talking to someone you know because there's a lot of these physical book clubs that are coming up and and reading is becoming kind of a changing from a solo activity to also a community activity where people come together read together all of that stuff so so i i really like those trends but yeah my final question for you is what are you working on next are you staying in the world of internet culture are you exploring something new so can i be honest like um i put everything that i had into the book all my ideas um all the thoughts that i've had over the past so many years of my life there is stuff that was edited out of the book that i'm planning to repurpose into say essays i've already had one out in book a couple of weeks back so i'm just looking to uh i mean and all those ideas are within the realm of internet so i'm hoping to release writing from time to time but i'm interested now more in just exploring the world in general i'm really charging creatively so i'm engaging a lot with art from other mediums i'm attending plays i'm watching films i thought um when annie gives it those ones i'll be the last weekend when it re-released where in Delhi we had a bunch of shows uh that was nice i'm just looking at engaging with um art made by other people and um ideas have always come to me so i will wait uh for the next idea to come to me i do want to dabble uh with fiction maybe after this i think i've had my fix of non-fiction um for now so there is that there are ideas that i have like i'll keep thinking about them maybe at some point but it will take time like after the break yeah but i've always admired your curiosity you know ever since i got to know you because the way that you kind of not only analyse internet culture and analyse things around you but also come up with new ideas and that's why you make such a compelling journalist i've always loved that about you and uh can't wait to see what you come up with next i think creative yeah creative recharges are the best way to do that because you're just filling your cup and then you'll see sort of uh what comes out i'm sure it'll be really really fantastic so thank you yeah thank you so much for this conversation and uh you know it's been great sort of as watching your journey and collaborating with you and to many more such collaborations in the future yes yes 100 percent thank you thank you tara hope you enjoyed this episode of books and beyond with bound this podcast is created by bound a company that helps you grow through stories find us at bound india on all social media platforms tune in every wednesday as we peek into the lives and minds of some brilliant authors from india and south asia