Self-knowledge in the digital age

In Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini Vara turns the most ordinary act of typing into a search bar into a mirror of modern identity.

- AKANKSHYA ABISMRUTA.

A Stanford graduate who came of age amid Silicon Valley's early boom, she built her career reporting on the rise of Amazon, Google, and Facebook for The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Wired. Yet in this book, she shifts from covering tech empires to examining how they have shaped her life. Born in 1982, Ms Vara was the first generation to grow up alongside the internet’s expansion. Her essays chronicle this convergence of curiosity migrating online, and convenience turning into dependency. She asks, persistently, what does it mean to have a self when every aspect of it can be searched and simulated?

Ms Vara begins by narrating her use of early chatrooms and Yahoo search as safe spaces for questions she couldn’t bear to ask anyone on subjects such as the colour of her skin and, later, her sister’s Ewing sarcoma diagnosis. This is not to say that her queries were met with a million search results as it might today. She writes, “The truth is that before content exists, there were people like me who, through the act of searching, communicated a desire for answers. That is, for content.”