Gen Z and the gaze: The culture of being seen

Look closely at the visual—a young woman is staring at a photograph of herself. She is standing in the middle of a protest, her phone held close to her face. On the screen is a visual of the crowd around her—the placards, bodies, commotion she is already a part of. Someone nearby photographs her as she looks at the image on her phone.

The image seems to fold in on itself: the protest is happening around her, on the screen in her hand, and now in the photograph being taken of her. For a moment, it is difficult to tell who is watching and who is being watched. Everyone seems to be watching, and everyone seems to be inside the picture.

This summer, the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi produced images like this, almost by accident. A movement that had begun online had now arrived in the physical world, carrying its internet vocabulary with it and the visual grammar of the feed. One video turned a police chase into ‘Subway Surfers’, a popular mobile game. The police were chasing a protester, and the protester was running very fast while recording himself. He later posted that as a Reel with the ‘Subway Surfers’ music. It was damn funny for the audience. Protesters carried copies of the Constitution and roses for policemen. Their phones, meanwhile, were busy turning the day into material for another audience. The peculiar thing was not that the protesters were performing. All protests perform. So do elections, weddings and religious ceremonies. The peculiar thing was that the protesters could watch themselves performing while they were still inside the performance.

I find this position strange. For most of history, the audience had a seat. It could be a theatre seat, a cinema seat, the ground at a political rally, or the back row at a mushaira. There was usually some distance between the person doing the thing and the person watching it. Of course, the distance was never absolute. Audiences have always talked back to culture. They cheered and heckled. They copied fashions, argued over films, carried songs home and made stories their own. Now, you can be inside the thing and outside it at the same time. Perhaps this is one of the stranger positions the internet has created for us: we no longer have to wait for the audience to arrive, we carry one with us.

In 1956, sociologist Erving Goffman made a similar observation in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. We behave differently when we know we are being watched. Goffman borrowed the language of theatre to describe this. There was a “frontstage”, where we performed a role before other people, and a “backstage”, where we could prepare for it or simply stop performing. But when the smartphone came, the stage became portable, and so did the audience. After a point, the two began travelling together.

Over three centuries ago, Diego Velázquez had already played a similar trick on the viewer in Las Meninas. The 1656 oil painting shows Velázquez standing at his easel, inside the scene he is painting. The king and queen of Spain appear only as a reflection in a mirror at the back of the room. Some of the figures in the painting seem to be looking directly at the viewer. It is never quite clear who is looking at whom. The smartphone has given ordinary people a much less elegant version of the same problem. Take the photograph of a sunset. Then look at the photograph to check whether the sunset looked as good as it felt. We have begun to experience things twice. First, while they are happening. And then again, as an image of ourselves having been there.

India now has 1.03 billion internet users, according to DataReportal’s 2026 India report, and 500 million social media user identities. Instagram alone had a potential advertising reach of 481 million in late 2025. These numbers don’t tell us how many people are “performative”. They tell us something much simpler. The room in which Indian public life happens has become very, very large. And almost everyone has a camera.

But the internet was not always this crowded. Anurag Minus Verma, who wrote The Great Indian Brain Rot about India’s internet culture, remembers a very different internet. He recalls, in a recent interview, that he used to call the internet the “revenge of loners”. Anonymity mattered then. You could be unknown or even somebody else.

Ria Chopra describes almost the opposite experience in Never Logged Out: “One day we logged on to the internet, and then we never logged out.” For her, the internet is no longer a place you visit. It has become a “default state of being”. That is quite a change. The early internet gave you a way to escape the gaze, but the Gen-Z internet makes the gaze much harder to escape. Someone is always watching, or at least there is always the possibility of being watched. Once you begin thinking about that gaze, the story is no longer only psychological; it becomes economic, too.

For Amal Ghafoor, a young filmmaker in Kochi, the internet has been a kind of liberation. The old film industry could decide whether a young person was worth watching before the audience ever got to see what he could do. Social media changed that. A creator, he says, can find an audience first and perhaps use that audience to enter the industry later. Some of the power, in other words, has moved from the institution to the individual.

Muhammed Fawas, a Kerala-based actor, storyteller and content creator, knows this from the other side. He began as someone who watched creators and eventually became one. The phone that had once been a source of arguments at home became his workplace. Then his workplace acquired an audience, and slowly that audience began to have expectations of him. Fawas talks about the peculiar cruelty of having to play the happy version of himself even when life is going badly. Sadness cannot always be allowed to interrupt the person people have become used to seeing. “The joker should not cry,” is how he describes the expectation. There is something almost melancholic about that. This is where Goffman’s backstage becomes harder to find. There is not much room to step away when the audience is always there.

Fawas watches his saves, comments and shares closely. What people respond to helps determine what he makes next. The viewer is no longer simply at the receiving end of the work. Without necessarily intending to, the viewer has become part of deciding what gets made. Once the audience begins influencing what is made, it can also influence what gets sold. Meta’s 2026 research in India found that 84 per cent of surveyed Gen Z consumers discover new products and brands through its platforms. The study is commissioned by Meta, so its findings need to be read in that context. But the larger change is difficult to miss. Entertainment and advertising are no longer neatly separated. The person selling you a product may also be the person telling you what to wear, what to read, where to travel and whom to admire. You may have followed them for a joke. Somewhere along the way, they become part of how you decide what to buy.

Politics has also begun to speak the same language. The CJP protest over the NEET controversy made the point almost too perfectly. The movement began with an online joke and grew into a physical political mobilisation. Its language, imagery and momentum travelled between the street and the screen. When education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, the movement had achieved the political outcome it had been demanding. Then, in the middle of that agitation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the protesting youth through a Reel, rather than the conventional political address. The format itself became part of the story.

Gurmehar Kaur, writer and student activist, offers an important correction to the argument that anything designed for an online audience must be shallow. Social media, she tells THE WEEK, can make protest more participatory and creative; visibility does not automatically make an act less genuine. That matters because being aware of an audience is not the same as performing for a false one. A photograph can be self-promotion, but it can also simply say: I was there. The more interesting change is what happens when that awareness follows us beyond the moments we consciously choose to share. That awareness changes not only how Gen Z presents itself, but also how it treats the culture it inherits.

Over 80 years ago, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges played with a similar idea in his short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Menard decides to write Don Quixote again, word for word. The words don’t change. But Borges argues that they acquire a different meaning because they are being written at a different time, by a different person, for a different reader. Gen Z isn’t rewriting the past word for word. But it has become very comfortable moving things around. To them, a dialogue can become a meme. Something made for one generation can be picked up by another and made to mean something completely different. We do this so casually now that it barely feels like we are doing anything at all. The person who was once watching is now also part of the making.

That brings us back to the photograph. The young woman at the protest is still looking at herself on her phone. At first, it seemed like she was checking whether she had captured the protest. Maybe she was. But maybe she was checking something else. What did the protest look like with her in it? There is a small difference between remembering that you were somewhere and seeing yourself as the person who was there. The first is memory and the second is self-consciousness. And somewhere between the two is a strange condition of life now.