We love to proclaim that we’re living through a digital revolution, that social media has fundamentally transformed how we learn, share, and grow. But scroll through Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts for ten minutes, and you’ll notice something familiar: the same obsession with disconnected facts, now dressed in better lighting and catchier background music. The medium has changed. The impulse hasn’t.
Consider this lineage: In the 1980s and 90s, middle-class Indian homes had their annual GK books—thick compendiums promising to make your child “knowledgeable.” These books treated information as inert objects to be collected: the longest river, the tallest mountain, the year some treaty was signed. Memorize these fragments, the logic went, and you’d be educated. Never mind that knowing the atomic number of selenium doesn’t teach you to think scientifically. Never mind that listing all the Mughal emperors chronologically doesn’t help you understand power, culture, or historical change.
Then came Kaun Banega Crorepati in 2000, and suddenly trivia graduated from cult quiz circles to prime-time national obsession. The show was brilliant television—high stakes, dramatic music, Amitabh Bachchan’s gravitas. But it reinforced the same underlying assumption: that knowledge is a collection of discrete, decontextualized facts, and the person who hoards the most wins. The format demanded it. You couldn’t ask contestants to demonstrate critical thinking in forty-five seconds. You needed clean questions with cleaner answers.
Fast forward to 2025, and we have social media creators building entire brands on trivia. “Did you know?” videos rack up millions of views. Quick-fire quiz formats go viral. Comment sections fill with people proudly announcing they got 7/10. It’s the GK book reincarnated as dopamine-optimized content, and it works because the appetite was always there. We never stopped wanting to feel smart without doing the hard work of actually getting smarter.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the digital age hasn’t revolutionized Indian learning culture. It’s simply made our existing preferences more efficient. We’ve always valued the appearance of knowledge over the substance of understanding. We’ve always conflated information retention with intellectual capability. The algorithm didn’t create this—it just learned what we’d been teaching ourselves for decades.
The Educational Assembly Line
Our K-12 education system is the grand architect of this confusion. Walk into most Indian classrooms, and you’ll find students preparing for exams that test recall, not reasoning. History becomes a list of dates and names. Science becomes formulas to memorize without understanding their derivation or application. Literature becomes answers to “write a character sketch” questions, regurgitated from guide books that turn complex texts into neat, examination-ready packages.
The board exam system demands this. When you need to evaluate millions of students, multiple-choice questions and predictable short answers are administratively convenient. Assessing genuine understanding—the ability to synthesize, critique, or create—is messy and subjective. So we optimize for what’s measurable: did you remember the answer we wanted? The student who scores 95% might not be able to explain why something matters, but they’ve proven they can store and retrieve information on command. That’s what we reward.
This bleeds into coaching culture, where JEE and NEET aspirants spend years mastering problem patterns rather than developing mathematical intuition or scientific curiosity. The system produces excellent test-takers who sometimes turn out to be mediocre thinkers. But it produces them at scale, and that efficiency is what a developing nation with limited resources needed—or told itself it needed.
Knowledge Work in the Age of Trivia
So what happens when this education system meets social media? We get creators who’ve correctly identified that their audience—raised on GK books and board exams—responds to content that feels educational without demanding actual cognitive effort. A sixty-second video about “5 mind-blowing facts about space” delivers that hit of feeling informed. It’s edutainment that requires no follow-up, no deeper engagement, no uncomfortable realization that you don’t actually understand orbital mechanics.
This isn’t the creators’ fault. They’re responding to platform incentives and audience preferences shaped by decades of conditioning. Trivia performs well because it’s bite-sized, shareable, and makes viewers feel clever. It fits perfectly into the attention economy’s constraints. But calling it knowledge work is like calling a trailer the same as watching the film.
Real knowledge work—the kind that builds expertise—looks different. It involves sustained attention to complex problems. It requires wrestling with ambiguity, tolerating confusion, and building mental models that connect disparate concepts. It means reading the entire research paper, not just the abstract. It means practicing a skill until you develop intuition, not just watching someone else do it competently.
Can you gain genuine knowledge online? Absolutely. The internet offers unprecedented access to primary sources, expert lectures, and communities of practice. A motivated learner can now access resources that would have required institutional affiliation a generation ago. But gaining knowledge has always required something the medium can’t provide: the learner’s willingness to do difficult, sustained intellectual work. The GK book couldn’t give you that either. Neither could KBC. The packaging was never the problem.
Three Counterarguments
First, the democratic access argument: Perhaps trivia content serves as a gateway. Not everyone begins with the capacity or confidence for deep learning. Quick-fact videos might spark curiosity that leads some viewers toward more substantial engagement. We shouldn’t dismiss content just because it’s entry-level. The GK books, for all their limitations, did introduce many children to topics they’d later pursue seriously.
Second, the contextual value argument: Maybe we’re too quick to dismiss factual knowledge. In an era of misinformation, even basic factual literacy matters. Knowing verifiable information—that vaccines don’t cause autism, that climate change is scientifically established—isn’t mere trivia. Sometimes, knowing facts is the foundation for critical thinking, not its opposite. The hierarchy we draw between “facts” and “understanding” might be artificial.
Third, the format adaptation argument: Perhaps each generation develops knowledge differently, and digital natives are building cognitive skills we don’t recognize because we’re measuring with outdated metrics. Quick-switching between information sources, pattern recognition across disparate content, collaborative sense-making in comment sections—these might be legitimate forms of learning that our print-culture bias dismisses as shallow.
The Question We Avoid
But here’s what nags: if the digital revolution hasn’t changed our fundamental relationship with learning—if we’re still choosing the path of least cognitive resistance, just with better graphics—what does that say about us? Are we waiting for a technology to fix a cultural problem that technology can’t solve? Or worse, are we using “disruption” and “innovation” as cover stories, pretending we’ve evolved while our appetites remain exactly where they’ve always been?
Maybe the packaging isn’t just fancier. Maybe it’s more seductive, making it even easier to mistake consumption for comprehension. The GK book at least sat on your shelf, a silent reminder of your aspirations. The algorithm just keeps serving you the next hit, never asking whether you’re actually learning or just feeling like you are.