Internet Internet Na Raha

I recently met with a few engineering batchmates after almost 5-6 years. All of us are above 40 years old men, married with a child or two and belong to the older millennial age group.

Each of us has been getting used to being called Uncles in the last decade but we often stare in disbelief when teens or tweens (who are no longer kids) refer to us as Uncle. One of us even suffered the ignominy of being called an uncle by a graduate who got her first job.

Well, perhaps, we are Uncles. More than our lives, this is perhaps truer wr.t to the internet which has evolved into something very different since we started using it.

So then, let me talk about our experience of the internet instead of our routine lives right now. I find the term millennials (1981 – 1996) to be too broad to refer to a group and I will refer to us as older millennials who are more than 35 years old.

I wanted to keep this gender agnostic but then let me add the disclaimer that is centered around the experiences of older millennial men in India. This piece has been inspired by the NY Times essay and social media discussions on how millennials have aged out of the internet. However, there’s an Indian context to it.

We, older millennials belong to the age group in India who attended NIIT classes to learn how to operate a computer. Some of us even went to typewriting classes to lay the foundation for our lifelong relationship with the computer.

Most of our online lives started with a Yahoo ID (with names we thought were funky like diehard_optimist_4ever) and the Gmail ID when it came was a sign of credibility and made us feel cool (even with our actual names). Orkut was the first social networking platform we used, and we used MSN chat as freshers at the workplace.

More than 20 years ago, we were the first ones who ran the internet in our families and social circles. We told each other stories of chatting with women (well, she said she was 25/F/UK) across different parts of the world on Yahoo chatrooms without ever seeing or hearing the person we were chatting with.

On the other extreme, I have also heard stories of strangers who met on Yahoo chatrooms and Orkut and ended up being life partners. No wonder then that the Yahoo chatrooms and stranger requests on Orkut thrived!

Orkut disappeared and Facebook came. We took to Facebook and then got our parents on it too. We got married a few years later and then saw that our better halves disappeared from Facebook or turned dormant since they found it very similar to a loud and noisy family drawing room where their parents and in-laws congregated on festive occasions.

Well, it was all going fine with the ups and downs of life but somewhere over the years, the internet changed. It wasn’t an overnight thing, but it happened gradually. The seeds of this change were perhaps sown when the smartphone was born.

We were perhaps the earliest adopters of smartphones, but little did we realize that the smartphone brought in a new generation of users much younger than us (and much smarter). They were born in the digital era unlike us who always had to learn. They changed the internet forever.

Digital platforms kept changing. We always thought we were keeping up with the changes. But today, primary school children spend more time on Roblox and know more about it than you and me. My 8-year-old daughter tells me that she watches Roblox memes on YouTube and I can only gape in disbelief.

Older millennials like me have been opting out of social media platforms in the past few years unless their work demands that they use them. We are sceptical about sharing our children's pictures online on Instagram and prefer closed platforms like WhatsApp.

Facebook’s algorithm stopped prioritizing our cliched life updates and instead filled the newsfeed with different types of ads. That was the death knell for any average older millennial who was still using the platform to share updates. In the last 7-8 years, I have largely used Facebook to update my display pic whenever I felt like doing it.

TikTok? Well, I like the sound of its name, but I belong to a computer/laptop first generation. My phone camera screams every time I take a pic asking me to hold my phone still. Doing short videos isn’t my cup of tea. I can’t do it Teekh-taakh! (I can’t get it right).

On social media, all we are left with is LinkedIn where we link everything that’s happened around the world to serve corporate Gyan. Well, even that’s only the external part of it. Behind the scenes, we are busy looking for the next best job or the person who can give us the next best job. In other words, it’s only a refined version of Naukri.com. Of course, we aspire to make it something more meaningful, but it will remain a professional platform and not a personal one.

Online search was something we thought we had mastered. We prided ourselves on our ability to understand any topic scouring the internet. But now, you have an Alexa in your homes that answers a range of questions for people across age groups. Professionally, the rise of AI and ChatGPT has meant that we need to restart along with the younger generations.

The websites have also changed. The long-format content is being replaced by short videos. These days, you can spend an entire day watching Insta reels and YouTube shorts.

For example, for close to two decades, Cricinfo (now ESPNcricinfo) was the first page I opened on the internet every single day. Earlier, Cricinfo used to have at least 4 articles analyzing every Test and ODI. Most of these have been replaced by short videos by experts. I have moved to using cricket apps that have longer videos which keep making their content shorter by the day. I am left to feel old and left out again!

I am not disputing the fact that there are websites with good long-form content, but I am lamenting the fact that’s no longer the norm.

The structure of the internet has changed. It’s no longer the internet that we knew and maybe, that’s why it’s no longer fun for us, older millennials.

Things always seem to change as you grow older. Your priorities change, the priorities of your friends change and sometimes your friends also change. Your perception of love also changes post-marriage from the time you were in college and maybe your first job. Sadly, for us, the internet can also be added to this it’s-not-been-the-same list along with friendship and love.

The famous song in the old (even for an older millennial) Bollywood movie ‘Sangam’ can perhaps be updated for all of us.

Dost dost na raha,

Pyar pyar na raha,

Internet internet na raha,

Zindagee hame teraa?aitbar?naa?raha!