Book Title: Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Author: Vauhini Vara
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Number of Pages: 352
ISBN: 978-9361316418
Date Published: Jun. 28, 2025
Price: INR 377
Book Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Your Whole Life Will Be Searchable
(pages 5-7)
I first encountered the internet at the home of a girl from school whose parents were acquaintances of my parents. This was in the early 1990s, in a well- off suburb of Oklahoma City called Edmond. I remember the girl’s name well, but it feels unfair to share it; I’ll call her Lily Zhang. Lily steered me to a room away from our parents with a beige desktop computer. She typed some characters and tapped the mouse, and the computer burst into a long, staticky screech, punctuated by a series of sharp beeps, as if the machine were hyperventilating. It was an anxiety- provoking sound, at an anxiety- provoking time in my life. I was eleven, twelve.
We had recently moved to Edmond from Saskatchewan, Canada, the prairie province where I’d been born and raised. My dad, a doctor, had enrolled in a program at a nearby univer-sity to specialize as an occupational physician— part of a plan to relocate our family to the United States, where we could secure more promising futures than the ones available in Saskatchewan. I’d been through ele-mentary school with the same classmates, kind Canadian boys and girls who treated my high self- regard, considering the circumstances (bad skin, social obliviousness, tender sensitivity to schoolyard injuries, over-enthusiasm about math exams), with gentle forbearance.
Because of this, I hadn’t understood, upon arriving in Edmond, that I was fated to be a social outcast there, and so, it was only when I walked up to the prettiest girls in the sixth grade and sat with them, admiring the gloss on theirfull, smooth lips, expecting to be invited to be friends, and they only subtly shifted their bodies so that I was no longer in their line of sight, as did many others over the following weeks, that I, for the first time in my life, became aware of my own shortcomings in the eyes of other human beings. My body itself offended— not just my brown and eczematous skin, but also my quarter- inch- thick glasses and my tummy- first way of moving through the world— even before I opened my mouth.By the time of the invitation to Lily’s house, I had a stronger sense of the social hierarchy of Central Middle School and, in turn, had grown more modest in my self- presentation, though my internal self- esteem hadn’t waned. Lily also occupied a lowly rank but outwardly displayed major confidence, for which I judged her. Her loud, slightly arrogant voice. The way she hogged the keyboard, conveying pride of ownership. All projection on my part, in retrospect.
It was in this context that when the modem’s shrieking gave way to silence, and Lily introduced me to my first America Online chat room, in which strangers from all over the world could meet other strangers, each human being manifesting on- screen only as their chosen screen name, everyone’s messages jos-tling democratically against everyone else’s in the same index card– sized window, I found myself utterly enchanted. This was, I thought, the most exciting invention I had seen in my life.This period had a name: the Eternal September. In the formative years of the internet, in the 1980s and early 1990s, old- school internet users who hung out on message boards would get irritated every September when freshmen showed up at universities, received their campus- based internet accounts for the first time, and flooded the message boards.
“They would use them to, among other things, download naughty images,” Jay Furr, an early internet user, told me. In 1989, the British computer scientist Tim Berners- Lee, working at a European institution called CERN, had invented the World Wide Web, a global information system that involved using browsers to open hyperlinked documents. Then, in April 1993, CERN decided to make its World Wide Web source code freely available. Suddenly internet traffic swelled, with companies like America Online coming along to capitalize on it. “The thing that brought about the ‘Eternal September’ was the availability of commercial Internet access,” Furr told me. For a fee, these companies would connect you to the internet through your phone line. If someone else in your house tried to make a call while you were online, you’d get disconnected without warning.
America Online started a direct- mail campaign sending floppy disks and CDs to people’s homes, offering some free hours of internet use if people signed up. “POP this FREE software in your computer for 10 FREE hours online!” one promotional mailing read. When the trial ran out, America Online charged a fixed amount— at one point, $9.95 for five hours of monthly internet access, with an option for “heavy users” to buy more time, for $2.95 an hour. That campaign was maybe as important as the opening of the World Wide Web’s source code in getting people using the internet. It’s how Lily Zhang’s parents must have gotten online. Soon after my first exposure to AOL in Lily’s house, my parents also bought a subscription, as did millions of others across the United States and, eventually, the world. If you were alive then, you might have first gone online.
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Excerpted with permission from Searches by Vauhini Vara, published by Fourth Estate.
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