What Happens When We’re Never Logged Out?

I went to Kunzum in GK for a conversation with Ria Chopra around her book Never Logged Out.

Much of the discussion was about Gen Z and the internet, but the idea I kept returning to afterwards was a simpler one: how difficult it has become to separate what is real online from what is performed for an audience.

Of course, people have always performed versions of themselves.

What feels different now is the frequency of it. A meal can become content before it has been eaten. A holiday is experienced partly through the photographs it might produce. Opinions are formed, expressed and sometimes abandoned in public. Even things that begin privately can acquire an imagined audience.

For people who have grown up online, this isn't necessarily a separate "digital life". It is simply life.

That distinction came up in different ways during the conversation, and I found myself thinking about my own assumptions as someone who remembers a world before social media became so embedded in everyday behaviour.

It is easy to describe younger internet users through neat labels: shorter attention spans, creator culture, personal brands, constant connectivity. Those descriptions may contain some truth, but they can also flatten something much more complicated.

The internet is simultaneously where people make friends, discover communities, learn, work, flirt, argue, perform, belong and occasionally retreat from the world around them.

Perhaps that is why conversations about internet culture need a little more patience than they usually receive.

I went to the session expecting to hear about Gen Z.

I left thinking more about the rest of us — and about how much of our own behaviour has changed without our noticing.

Ria was also kind enough to sign my copy of the book.

Another book added to the pile beside my bed, and several new questions added along with it.