World Social Media Day | 5 debut novels capture the virality, absurdity & influence of social media

World Social Media Day is observed on June 30. (Photo: Austin Distel via Unsplash)

The year was 2007. While walking towards the water coolers in the corridors of the second floor of my school, I sensed that my peers were giving me awkward glances. Dismissing it, for there was no reason to be suspicious otherwise, I returned to the classroom.

“So, what’s the right option: A, B, C, or D?” one of my classmates whispered in my ear. I found this cryptic question bewildering. Then came thunderous laughter.

Later, a friend of mine, my namesake, informed me that one of our classmates had made a page on Orkut, and posted its first poll: “Who’s the dumbest person in class IX C?” and all four options are Saurabh Sharma. A photograph of a dog was the page’s cover image.

Back then neither I had any language to express what had happened nor access to the Internet like my privileged classmates. But this is to share how social media has been a great influence in all our lives, irrespective of the generation: boomers, millennials, or Gen Z. For how on earth could you get so many people to laugh at a joke made at my expense so discreetly had it not been for the Internet. Naturally so there are so many stories out there, of bullying, of hope, and of courage that we consume on social media every day. It’s not so much the virality, which has its role to play, but it’s sheer unavoidability that we hopelessly cling to it for validation, support, and so often go to just be heard.

As we commemorate its presence and influence on our lives this World Social Media Day, here are a few books whose plot is either centred on or is driven by a bizarre social-media incident on which they’re based.

One of the first such books I read was Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2020). A Muslim girl, Jivan, posts innocently on social media a critique of the police and the government, not knowing that it’s about to create havoc in her life. She writes, “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?”

This “kind of leisure dressed up as agitation” has an impact that she never imagined. A similarly devastating thing happens in Aravind Jayan’s debut novel Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors (Serpent’s Tail, 2022). This extremely well-written book humorously deals with the life of a teenage couple who share intimacy in a public space, and, without their consent, get filmed, and this clip goes viral on social media. It not only shows our reliance and compulsive need as voyeurs on social media to access and draw pleasure from the most controversial things online but also showcases the attitudes of middleclass people towards something that they hold so close to themselves: respectability. Because, as Jayan writes in the book, “Sex was one thing; a sex scandal was another thing altogether.”

While Jayan’s book deals with a few things millennials like me have witnessed in abundance growing up, Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Granta, 2023) brilliantly captures not only the apparent absurdity of influencer culture but also pushes back against the traditionalist way of writing a novel.

Her book reads like a series of Instagram posts, where a nameless protagonist tells us all about the two people she’s constantly stalking and checking up on by hate-scrolling their Instagram pages: “the man I want to be with” and “the woman I am obsessed with”. While the former happens to be a perennial cheater and an artist whom she loves apparently, the latter is a Caucasian woman who’s an appropriator of other cultures to exercise her influence and tells stories in a contrived manner to gain a follower base who’ll even find her farts “floral and unusual” per the protagonist. This stunning book won this year’s British Book Awards’ Book of the Year: Discover Award and was shortlisted and longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction respectively.

Another set of widely popular books that deal with digital absurdism is Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (Hodder Studio, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, 2021).

Lockwood’s book, which was the winner of the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for both the 2022 Booker Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction, deals with the unnamed narrator’s journey in and out of what the author calls “the portal”. It’s perhaps one of the insanely funny novels that critiques the online culture but at the same time also deals with a personal tragedy so terrifying that one of the reviewers hailed the book’s style as “virtual realism”. Written in the form of vignettes, it goes on to address a variety of issues facing our entire species: the rise of fascism, online consumerism, parenting, making personal connections, and grieving.

Kasulke’s book, on the other hand, is written in the form of chats. Truly living up to its title, here our protagonist Gerald gets “imprisoned” in his office’s Slack workspace. While his body is in a comatose state, as discovered by his colleague, who pays a visit to Gerald’s apartment, he suddenly becomes productive, according to his CEO, so he’s granted permanent work from home (WFH) but he’s essentially inside a system! Gerald tries to convince everyone that because “the firm doesn’t have a disembodied consciousness sabbatical policy” — yes, it’s funny — he has no choice but to work hours on ends and convince Slack to get himself out but all that the Slackbot can do is share this message: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand! Sometimes, I have an easier time with a few simple keywords. Or you can head to our wonderful Help Centre for more assistance!”