Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India's Gen Z

by Ms Ria Chopra

One day we logged on to the internet, and then we never logged out.

On 15 August 1995, India officially logged on to the internet. If you're a young Indian today, you come from a generation that used to dream of the endless possibilities that came with having the world at our fingertips, and now must cope with its realities. India's Gen Z is inextricably tied to the internet – connected in more ways
than one. To understand one, you must understand the other.

From the quiet potential of the early internet to Bollywood's clumsy depictions of youth culture, from tote bags and trending aesthetics to anonymous hate and viral fame, from Ask.fm to AI, Never Logged Out by 'extremely online' Gen Z writer Ria Chopra tries to make sense of her generation and how they love, shop, and live on the internet.

In eight essays, each posing questions about selfhood, love, memory, privacy, anonymity, knowledge, fame, and ambition, Never Logged Out interrogates how the internet makes and breaks this generation. Fresh, funny, and startlingly insightful, Ria weaves together personal anecdotes, cultural commentary, and a sharp understanding of her generation and the world today into a first-of-its-kind book about the experience of growing up on, with, and because of the Indian internet.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Indian Literature, India, Cultural

242 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 2, 2025

Reviews

[Afrin Zeba · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been wanting to read this ever since i heard ria was publishing a book, as someone who is chronically online the book had a lot of aspects i could relate to (or have lived through) it also allowed me to think more consciously about what the internet as a tool has meant and will mean to me
Alsooo right balance of anecdotal and informational content, might re-read!

[Janvi Chhabra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this!! Read non-fiction after quite a while.. it is worth it.
What I liked about this book was that it was well researched, but the how to connect those outcomes of research was well thought, it wasn't just blindly aligning to them, but was thought through by the author. I follow her on instagram, and usually like her writings and reels on that, but this book gave me even more insight into how she thinks.

The best part about it was how she nudges us to think about the questions that matter!

[TeaRoom · Rating 5 out of 5]

when this becomes an international bestseller and classic, i’ll know i called it in the first month of its release. I don’t have any other way to put this but for years i have wanted to read this very book but it simply did not exist. And now it does. @riachops is going places and i’ve known it since her twitter threads days. Thank you for writing this and sharing it with the world :)

[Sayari Debnath · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sweet trip down the memory lane but Ria doesn’t let her essays be just that. A wide variety of perspectives, from Plato to Anurag Minus Verma, support the arguments she makes for the Internet culture. While not exactly revelatory to the many of us who grew up at the same time as her with similar online experiences, the connections she draws contextualises why we feel the way we feel about the Internet. The world is moving at a breakneck speed, and Never Logged Out is a good starting point - an archive of sorts - for a new generation of readers who were born into 5G. Imminently readable and fun. Well done!

[Anushka Mukherjee]

I’m just not getting anything that the average urban online young person wouldn’t already know. it reads more like the memoir of this writer, supported by (honestly good) research, but without the tenacity of external challenges or internal inquiry. The point of the book is made early (we are too online, it’s hurting us), and then repeated throughout without no new consequences or emotion. Idk who this book is for. Most people loving it have lived through what it wants to say.

[mrunmayee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wait, is this f book about us?

[Spoorti Gattu · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this really intriguing set of 8 essays, Ria Chopra tries to portray various ways India's Gen-Z grew up with the internet, as they continue to grapple with the extent to which their lives are curated and affected by social media. Taking examples from personal life, she delves into the availability of internet, a no-brainer deduction explaining the correlation between class, society, and country's development deciding who had the ability to get on the internet, and in what format.

As someone who is chronically online, I was able to understand 98% of her pop culture references, elaborately juxtaposed against theories of other famous psychologists and anthropology professionals. It was not an answer to whether the internet is good or bad for you, but rather the ability to dissect different eras of the internet that defined how and where we used social media, being the very basis of curation, portrayal of self, and ideals we developed as a generation.

She argues that no generation is dumber than the previous one, but rather, the availability of so much information forces us to pick and choose what we want to draw from, thereby giving us a niche ability of drawing patterns, and connecting the dots from a myriad of sources, something the older generations did not have the capability to do. She effortlessly manages to bring in socio-economic standards that continue to separate a "smart" person from an uneducated one, purely on the basis of the colonial language. But she is also quick to note the omnipresent nature of the internet, that quickly seeped it's way into tier II and III cities, enough to give everyone across India an equal access to information of all kinds.

I think this is a great book to pick up if you want to understand how the internet manages to shape you, see where your personality begins, and if it is actually your true self or not to begin with. She talks at length about the depiction of the internet "on the internet", and how the "medium is the message", and if we want to fully understand what the pros and cons of it are, we can't help but continue using it to the best of our agencies, in order to find out what becomes of it in the coming decades.

Absolutely refreshing, gave me a new perspective of critical thinking abilities, would definitely recommend!

[Khushi Sinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who usually resists reading non-fiction, this book exceeded my expectations. It strikes the perfect balance between research/information, anecdotes and trivia.

Ria captures the digital ecosystem with remarkable nuance - the forces that shape it, and the ways it shapes us in return. In just 200 pages, I felt a mix of wonder, nostalgia and clarity - almost like experiencing the internet itself in all its complexity.

I’ll be thinking for a long time about how much of my thinking is truly my own and how much is influenced by the socio-economic, political and online worlds I exist within - though at this point, I’m starting to wonder if any thought is untouched by these forces.

Looking forward to more such thought provoking books from Ria.

[Nytika Shetty · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I am not Gen Z, half my life has been on the internet, and this book made me realise how much that experience has shaped who I am today and how it will continue to influence who I become. It also reminded me to be cautious about how the online world tries to slot us into predetermined lists and checkboxes. On the internet, you are always a target audience for someone, and your value to them depends on how neatly you fit into the categories they have created.

When you never truly log out, your life becomes a performance for others, and every past moment stays preserved for anyone to revisit.

It makes you wonder how often the labels the internet places on people begin to feel true simply because they are repeated, and how easily those simplified versions start to replace who they really are.

[Achu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do I start with this review ?
I loved this book.

Everything about it- how it’s written, what it stands for and what it’s asking of us. Ria has done a brilliant job in putting together a narrative that can be very daunting and messy to make sense of but, like I always believe, AI can never replace the critical thinking that some humans garner.

The gist of the book is very much about the digital trends that has come with the internet and furthermore shaped our lives. Some realisations can also be put into play in the context of our behavioural patterns as well and that’s exactly why it piqued my interest.

I took my sweet time to finish this book because of the amount of notes I wanted to make and the amount of similarities I found in my own journals that I wanted to compare and contrast. It’s truly been a fascinating journey to complete this reading and I’m so grateful for Ria Chopra for having created this work of art.

A shoutout to the glossary at the end that makes this book accessible to the masses outside of those who just get it.

[komal · Rating 5 out of 5]

ngl, i went into this book with high expectations and i’m so happy to say it hit every single mark. it’s rare for a non-fiction to stick with me this quickly — i was only three chapters in and i was already referencing one of the concepts mid-conversation with a friend.

the book strikes such a perfect balance: it makes you feel seen with relatable stuff, but it also forces you to think deeper ideas. i enjoyed learning about things i previously knew nothing about (still reeling from the askfm stuff).

also, i like how ria has backed everything up with theories, quotes, and references to other books that hit exactly where they need to. I LOVE IT.

[Disha Talaulikar · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a girl who logged on to the internet at 12 years old and has had the privilege of growing up on the internet, the lore behind certain niche things hits so close to home. I have seen the rise of some mega youtubers and have been there for their irrelevance era, have watched trends come and go, certainly bought something just for the sake of it and have fallen down the rabbit hole of quora, reddit or tumblr oh so often. The thesis of each essay was easy to follow and the thread tying it all together was so beautiful, the aspect of having grown on the internet sometimes makes me feel crass but at the same time it does feel like a huge part of my life, so reading this and understanding from a analytical and philosophical lens made me feel a tiny bit better that I AM THE INDIAN GENZ SHAPED BY THE INDIAN INTERNET.

[Krishna Adhaduk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never Logged Out by Ria Chopra is a book about Indian Gen Z’s relationship with the internet in a world that is now chronically online, often much to the dismay of the people doing the scrolling. Across eight essays, the author documents various internet trends, mixes them with psychology, sociology and cultural history, and liberally sprinkles in her own experiences of growing up online. Experiences, largely belonging to a particular kind of urban, English-speaking and relatively privileged Indian Gen Z.

There is an interesting idea in the book about how the internet has fragmented us into tiny chambers. You can be famous to a few thousand people in one corner of the internet and completely unknown everywhere else. Algorithms sort us into bubbles; the same names, jokes, controversies and cultural references circulate within them until everyone inside seems to inhabit the same world. It is through one such little corner of the internet that I knew of Ria before reading this book. She is something of a micro-celebrity in certain online circles. I do not know her personally, but back when I was a chronic Twitter user, before its enshittification, considerably accelerated by the Musk takeover, I would occasionally stumble across her tweets. Opinions about her were remarkably polarized. She had plenty of enthusiastic fans, as her large following makes obvious, and an equally enthusiastic contingent of haters. I was indifferent to either side, but reading this book made me understand both of them a little better.

The book begins with the author recounting her early relationship with the internet. She created her Instagram account in 2013, at fourteen, by which point some of her cooler classmates had already established themselves online. Elsewhere we encounter Ask.fm, Tumblr fandoms, Facebook relationship statuses and the peculiar rituals of an internet that still required you to consciously log on. There is considerable privilege embedded in this childhood, something the author duly acknowledges. In fact, the opening essay itself spends a fair amount of time discussing how internet access in India was shaped by class, geography and infrastructure.

That acknowledgement nevertheless produced a strange experience for me while reading. Ria was born in 1999. I was also born in 1999. She grew up largely in New Delhi; I grew up in Tier-2 cities. As I read about the internet culture surrounding her adolescence, I kept remembering the richer kids in my own school talking about many of these exact things, and the enormous FOMO I felt because an internet connection at home was still a luxury for us. While people her age were stalking Ask.fm profiles, navigating Tumblr fandoms and building online identities, I was begging my mother to take me to a cybercafe so I could finish a school project about scientists and their contributions.

This is not an attempt to win the Trauma Olympics. I had a perfectly decent childhood, and life has dealt me a reasonably good hand since. I mention it because this gap matters when discussing a book claiming to document the internet experience of a generation as enormous and economically diverse as Indian Gen Z. The internet may eventually have become democratized in India. Growing up with it certainly was not.

That distinction repeatedly surfaced while I was reading. There were moments when I recognized the internet described perfectly; others felt like overhearing conversations from the expensive table at the other end of the cafeteria. That probably also explains some of the hostility she receives online. Privilege produces resentment even when the privileged person acknowledges it, because acknowledgement does not erase difference. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing from that perspective, for you can only honestly write from the life you have lived. But it necessarily narrows who will see themselves reflected in the mirror. And to her credit, the author writes extremely well for the people who do.

Every essay begins with an engaging hook. The prose is conversational, accessible and usually effortless to follow. A typical chapter begins with an internet phenomenon, expands into some psychological or sociological idea, and eventually asks a larger question about what it means to be human while living through all this. The book is particularly good at explaining ideas without sounding like it is explaining ideas. You do not need to know what parasocial relationships, algorithmic identity formation or the attention economy are before picking this up. It is nonfiction written for people who grew up reading captions rather than Enid Blyton or PG Wodehouse. That is a genuine skill. Unfortunately, I often found myself wondering whether either the book was not meant for me or I simply lack whatever organ is required to properly appreciate internet culture.

Take the Orange Peel Theory essay, which uses viral relationship tests as an entry point into how Gen Z understands and performs romance online. There are several interesting ideas in it. My problem was structural. I genuinely thought the essay was ending on at least three separate occasions. Each time it seemed to have reached a natural conclusion, another thematic door opened and off we went again. There is nothing wrong with following an idea wherever it leads. But occasionally the book follows ideas the way I browse Wikipedia at 2 a.m - one perfectly reasonable link at a time until I suddenly realize I am nowhere near where I started.

I had a similar reaction to What’s in My Bag? The essay is broader than its title suggests: it moves from tote bags as cultural signifiers to celebrity bag videos, aesthetic identities, consumerism and the transformation of ordinary possessions into tools for performing the self online. The argument is perfectly coherent. I just could not shake the absurdly simple question - does this really require an entire essay? Human beings have always been fascinated by what famous people wear, eat, buy and own. Magazines existed largely because millions of us apparently needed to know which shampoo Madhuri Dixit used. Instagram and Vogue’s bag videos have changed the scale, speed and monetization of that curiosity, but I am less convinced that they have fundamentally changed the impulse itself. The medium is new. The monkey wanting to know what the higher-status monkey has in its bag is ancient. Perhaps, again, I am simply the wrong audience.

There is, however, one criticism I think survives the target-audience defense - the book can be extraordinarily meandering. The essay on fame provides my favourite example. Within a remarkably short stretch, probably not more than three paragraphs, we move through early Indian YouTubers, YouTube becoming a legitimate career, YouTube originally being conceived as a dating service, users repurposing it, the human instinct to rebel against intended uses, children running up playground slides, teenagers irritating their parents through literal interpretations of instructions, and Chinese citizens using a Bappi Lahiri song on Douyin to protest zero-COVID restrictions. Individually, every link in that chain can be explained. Collectively, I began to feel as though I had forty-two browser tabs open and could hear music playing from one of them but could not figure out which.

Perhaps this is deliberate. A book about an internet-addled generation whose attention is constantly being yanked between unrelated stimuli may itself benefit commercially from moving rapidly between unrelated stimuli. If so, the form certainly matches the subject. Whether that makes for good long-form nonfiction is another question.

There is another section that I hesitate to call a criticism because I suspect it explains, more than anything else, why the author sometimes rubs people the wrong way. In Post-Knowledge, the author asks an extremely important question: what does intelligence mean when machines can increasingly perform tasks that we once considered evidence of intelligence?

This is a question I care about enormously because it is not abstract to me. The kind of work I do could genuinely be transformed, or partly replaced, by machines that become better at scientific reasoning. I could explain why that worries me, what it says about intelligence, and what it might mean for the future of knowledge without telling you that I have a master’s degree in organic chemistry, that organic chemistry is considered difficult, that I am doing a PhD in computational chemistry, or that my work involves quantum-mechanical calculations. None of those credentials are necessary to make the argument. If I include them anyway, I am no longer merely making a point about artificial intelligence. I am also quietly making a point about my own intelligence.

And that is roughly the discomfort I felt while reading the author’s anecdote introducing her argument. She recounts appearing on Kaun Banega Crorepati, encountering a question whose answer she did not know, and reasoning her way towards the correct option using clues in the question. She ultimately quit rather than risk her winnings, but her inferred answer was correct. The episode becomes evidence for a larger distinction she draws between knowing and thinking: perhaps intelligence in an age of abundant information matters less as recall and more as deduction, synthesis and pattern recognition.

The philosophical point is good. The anecdote leaves a faintly self-congratulatory aftertaste. It is not because she mentions KBC. Personal essays obviously require personal anecdotes. It is because the anecdote places the author herself at the centre of an argument about intelligence and then uses her successful reasoning as evidence for the kind of intelligence she values. There is a fine difference between demonstrating intelligence in your writing and telling the reader a story whose conclusion is that you are good at thinking. Most good nonfiction writers simply let you infer the former.

I do not think this is malicious arrogance, nor do I think the passage deserves the kind of personal vitriol people direct at writers online. If anything, I suspect the author is simply unusually comfortable making herself the specimen under examination throughout the book. Sometimes that produces honesty. Sometimes it produces moments where the microscope appears suspiciously flattering.

And then there is the final essay, which contains my biggest disagreement with the book. Its broad argument is that despite how thoroughly the internet now structures our lives, Indian cinema and television have frequently struggled to portray it convincingly. The essay discusses why - filmmakers may be older than the characters whose internet lives they depict; digital communication is notoriously difficult to render visually; internet culture changes faster than production cycles; and, perhaps most importantly, India contains audiences with radically different levels of digital literacy. There is plenty here that I agree with.

But the essay eventually walks into a contradiction that I could not get past. The author praises CTRL for committing fully to a digitally native form of storytelling. She describes trying to watch it with her mother, who gave up within the first thirty minutes because the screenlife format and digitally saturated narrative were difficult for her to follow. The author herself understood it effortlessly because she belongs to precisely the demographic at which the film is aimed. Fair enough.

A few pages later comes Anupamaa. The author criticises the enormously popular daily soap for repeatedly using implausible instances of videos going viral as plot devices. A dance video goes viral enough to reunite a family. Another video from a party spreads almost instantaneously and causes scandal. To someone deeply immersed in internet culture, these depictions understandably look ridiculous.

But who exactly is Anupamaa for? My septuagenarian maternal grandmother watches it. She grew up in a remote village in Gujarat in a world where reliable electricity itself was not a given, never mind broadband internet. She does not understand why one reel gets 347 views and another gets three million. She could not care less. Nor should she. If “a video went viral” efficiently communicates to her that many people have now seen this thing and therefore the plot is moving forward, the device has done its job. So why judge Anupamaa by the digital-literacy standards of urban Indian Gen Z?

I understand the obvious counterargument - the criticism is about accuracy, not comprehensibility. A show can remain accessible without depicting virality absurdly. That is fair. But there is still something strange about demanding sophisticated internet realism from a daily soap whose core audience neither needs nor particularly wants it, immediately after praising a film whose accurate portrayal of internet culture was inaccessible even to your own mother.

It reminded me of watching Dr Salunkhe’s laboratory in CID as a tenth-grader who had just developed an interest in chemistry. I would look at some of the “experiments” and think the whole thing was completely bonkers. The chemistry was often laughable. But it also did exactly what it needed to do. If a daily-wage laborer comes home after an exhausting day and derives genuine entertainment from watching Salunkhe announce that someone has been poisoned because a solution has dramatically turned pink, does it really matter that what he has essentially demonstrated is phenolphthalein encountering an alkali? Scientific accuracy matters in a chemistry textbook. In CID, the pink liquid needs to tell the audience, quickly and unmistakably, that something suspicious has happened. The device serves the story.

Different cultural products serve different audiences, and accuracy cannot be judged entirely separately from that purpose. CTRL does not fail because my grandmother would hate it. CID did not fail because fifteen-year-old me knew enough chemistry to laugh at Dr Salunkhe. And Anupamaa does not fail because Ria Chopra finds its understanding of algorithms embarrassing. Once you accept that, the same question inevitably turns back towards Never Logged Out itself.

Before posting reviews, I usually read other Goodreads reviews to see whether other people noticed the same things I did or whether I have, as occasionally happens, completely lost the plot. What struck me here was how many reviewers mentioned that they ordinarily do not read nonfiction but enjoyed this. That makes complete sense. The author has a knack for taking ideas that could easily become dry cultural criticism and packaging them in a form that feels familiar to people accustomed to consuming information through the internet. She understands hooks. She understands references. She understands when to insert herself into the narrative. She understands how to make sociology feel like someone explaining something interesting to you over coffee rather than assigning you forty pages of literary criticism.

Anything that gets someone who does not normally read nonfiction to voluntarily pick up a nonfiction book is, in my opinion, doing something worthwhile. But it also helped me finally understand whom I think this book works best for - someone broadly within the urban, English-speaking Indian Gen Z experience; someone who has spent a considerable part of their life online; someone familiar with the cultural vocabulary of Instagram, Tumblr, Ask.fm, influencers, aesthetics, virality and doomscrolling; and, particularly, someone looking for an accessible first step into cultural nonfiction rather than an especially rigorous or revelatory work of it.

For that reader, I can see Never Logged Out being delightful, and kudos to the author for doing that. For me, it was engagingly written, occasionally insightful, frequently overextended and ultimately fairly mediocre.

Maybe that is the most appropriate possible reaction to a book about algorithmic bubbles. The internet may eventually have reached all of us, but it did not reach us at the same time, cost us the same amount, show us the same things, or give us the same childhoods.

We may all be Never Logged Out now.

We were never logged into the same world.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
I usually don't read non fiction but Ria Chopra talks about too many interesting things for me to not read it

[Sathvika · Rating 5 out of 5]

so cool. never have I ever read something that romanticized a topic so awesomely and also educated me a lot about it. the vocab and the quirky sentences. fab. so fun. so beaut. so unputdownable. oof.

[Rohit Sadavarte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hi guys, this book is about us. Can’t wait for Zoya Akhtar to hire Ria to work as an internet expert for her next film.

[Anushka Parmar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last sentence of the acknowledgement in this book is “I hope it makes you think” and it did. Reading this book made me aware of so many things. From how much the internet is impacting day to day life and the media to how the cotton tote came into being.
Okay so honestly speaking, Ria Chopra did not write anything groundbreaking in this book, I was already loosely aware everything that was mentioned here. However, it was way that she wrote, the way in which she conveyed her message. The book is full of references from a range of people, from plato to contemporary substack writers. The book has so many anecdotes and such interesting stories like that of prometheus to kabhie khushi kabhie gham. It was honestly an amazing experience reading this book. It felt like I was reading something personal. Knowing Ria Chopra, following her, and even meeting her once(!!) has made me aware of how she speaks and somewhat how she thinks also. Hence, the whole tike I was reading the book I could hear her voice in my head. It felt like she was speaking the sentences of the book.
Anyways, if you are someone who likes being aware of the current situations and are digitally very active, this is an amazing book.

[Srujana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really love many of Ria's cultural video essays on Instagram, but Never Logged Out didn't quite hit the mark for me.

My main critique is that it felt like it required heavy editing throughout. While the research itself is decent, much of it covers ground that a chronically online Gen Z or Millennial will already be deeply familiar with. Even the academic elements felt a bit weak, lacking the cohesiveness and depth I was hoping for. If that choice was made to make the book more accessible, I feel that accessibility could have been handled differently.

I actually read the essay "Post Knowledge" twice. While there is definitely merit to her argument regarding the evolving nature of knowledge and information, it left me wondering whether the author's insights on foresight reflect her personal experience or a broader observation of India's Gen Z; it ultimately felt more like the former. The final essay drags on and could have been significantly tightened up. The extended, rambling style unfortunately took away from the emotional impact of the ending.

Overall, it’s a decent debut, but it had the potential to be MUCH better. I still look forward to reading more of Ria's work in the future, hopefully written with a tighter structure and a sharper critical lens.

[Shatakshi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's like listening to a friend talk about their online lives - except that friend has a lot of other references which you might want to read as well. Easy read and wonderfully written.

[Sakshi Goenka · Rating 3 out of 5]

ria prefaces this book saying it’s for anyone who has a love-hate relationship with the internet, and the promise is delivered. i love that the essays weave a story specifically about indian genz growing up with the worldwideweb amidst our unique sociopolitical landscape. if you’re also always thinking about “how did we get here” when it comes to social media, digital archiving & online identities, this collection offers some grounding; with a pinch of validation for the nostalgia of a childhood spent offline. (3.5 ⭐️, writing style wasn’t my fav)

[Nikitha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much needed representation for both our generation and India. Also has one of the most heartfelt acknowledgements sections in a book.

[Naina · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

overall quite enjoyable, though a bit boring at some points.
it's complicated, what's in my bag, and post knowledge were standouts, with the second one being phenomenal and my favourite.

[isaac · Rating 5 out of 5]

"my argument throughout this book is a simple one: a generation once impacted can never be de-impacted by a force, and the internet is no different. for better or for worse, or perhaps for a secret third thing, we are who we are because we have had the internet we have had."

non-fiction books rarely ever become all-time favourites for me so this is huge. as someone who barely reads non-fiction, i picked this one because of a) the subject matter, and b) the author herself, who understands us. us who have grown so much on and because of the internet, right from dolling up the same skinny girls on girlsgames24.com to now being forced to but refusing to log in to generative ai platforms like chatgpt.

i need you to read this if you belong to urban india's gen z population. i promise there's something for you in here to question and take away. i don't think i can point out a favourite essay because i loved them all. i have so aggressively tabbed and annotated almost every page. what also added to my reading experience was hearing ria speak about her book in mumbai and getting to ask her a question about her writing style (you can tell an indian gen z connoisseur has written this, given the umpteen references and variety of sources, including substack?). you can also tell that this was written by a literature student; it is intersectional, brings in class, caste and gender at various points, and is highly introspective.

this really would be the PERFECT book to study/read/discuss in a digital cultures course (and unfortunately, the course i had on this topic massively failed to excite or teach me in any way). this is essential reading.

ria says that "representing gen z's online experiences cannot be an exercise in harsh judgment - it must always be rooted in empathy and curiosity and a drive to understand". and that's what she did. she held our hands and reassured us that it's not our fault entirely.

i admire ria's brain and her keenness to share random bits of trivia that will eventually make us all think. and that's what she did with her book too. she made us think. she made me think. she understands and empathises so deeply and that's what i loved most about this book. never once does it feel like she's blaming us for doomscrolling or having a love-hate relationship with the internet. we, along with major corporations, are complicit in the "never-logged-outness" of our lives today.

i hope to read more from you, ria <3 but meanwhile, i am going to down my own rabbit hole of reading your other writings and looking up all your sources you cite at the end.

[Rishi · Rating 5 out of 5]

To put it simply, this book is a love letter to the internet. I found the last essay very moving, Ria doesn’t try to tell you what you to make of the internet, she asks you to think.

The act of attention being an act of love, resonated with me, fundamentally we all notice and want to be noticed on the internet. How this relationship with the internet has transformed through its beginning, how it shapes it lives. Ria gives an expansive account of the internet in perspective of the Indian Gen Z.

It’s very rare for me to thoroughly enjoy a nonfiction book, but also this book talks about an experience that is very personal and real which is why it stands out compared to most nonfiction books. I will definitely be revisiting the essays. The reference section is a whole new pool of information I can’t wait to explore slowly!

[Anurag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally finished a book after long. Came straight to good reads to log it in, as if not logging it in would nullify the fact that I read it. Maybe, that’s what internet does to you, the constant exercise of posting things online, the books you read, the runs you do, the places you visit among other things. That said, coming back to the book, it’s AMAZING. partly that could be due to my bias towards ria as well, who I have been following for like 4-5 years now, i guess? But in all honesty, the book contains 8 essays, all insightful of things that I have been experiencing but never paid heed to analyse, it has tons of references to other interesting works and I love that about it. I personally, loved the 5th chapter for all the scandalous things i searched for after reading those lores. All in all, It was a very enriching read, you should definitely give it a try!

[Maith · Rating 5 out of 5]

what can i say? this book was definitely worth the 8 hr ish plane ride to get my hands on it. the topics discussed in the book resonated SO much with me - the internet, pop culture references, quizzing?!?! (when was the last time I read a book with quizzing in it) the personal stories - EVERYTHING. It gave such a fresh, unbiased look into an indian's experience on the internet and with so much food for thought.
cant wait to read more from the author :D

[Anjali :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a wonderful and refreshing take on the internet. Love the writing. Have followed Ria for a while and reading her book reflects her depth of thought and ability to put into words the complicated topics is amazing

[retroSneakers · Rating 5 out of 5]

read it as someone who wanted to learn, explore and witness the world through Ria's eyes. absolutely enjoyed every bit of it and the new rabbit holes i delved into while reading

[Gaurav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and comprehensive analysis of the Indian digital ecosystem.

[Janani Raj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched.