Social Capital: Life Online in the Shadow of Ireland’s Tech Boom - caught in the web

An Irish millennial’s take on “life online in the shadow of Ireland’s tech boom”, as the subheading of journalist Aoife Barry’s book Social Capital puts it, is, in concept, timely and promising.

Hers is a generation that matured during a breathtaking cultural transition, when microchip-based technologies first found a place within home and school. Many Irish children of that era wrapped small fingers around a computer mouse, a game console or a mobile phone and swiftly became more adept with them than their parents.

Most Irish millennials emerged into young adulthood familiar with the raspy boing-boing of a connecting dial-up internet modem. millennials were the first teens to explore nascent online social networks – discussion forums, Bebo, MySpace – and, naturally, whatever came next, the big platforms that have come to serve, for better and, too often, for worse, as our new public squares.

And this is the generation that came of age in the tech sector-dominated Celtic Tiger economy. A child born in the early 1980s started school in one of the poorest nations in Europe but sat the Leaving Cert in an increasingly wealthy country with a booming economy outperforming most in the world. That extraordinary, lightspeed shift owed much to years of massive inward investment by US technology companies that rushed to establish European bases here, mostly in and around Dublin. That’s quite a stage-setting for a book, and Barry explores both the dramatic uplift and the tragedy of life online and in Ireland’s capital. The end result is mixed.

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At its best, Social Capital is most compelling and cogent when offering personal experience or expert opinion from Irish voices, backed by concrete evidence and research. There’s much here of insightful interest, particularly when Barry details her own horrific experience of being cyberstalked and bullied for years by a man referred to in the book only as BOD, his sign-off on his unwanted communications.

Courageously, Barry and five other women targeted by BOD brought a formal complaint to the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau, which eventually resulted in a landmark case in 2019 that saw BOD convicted and jailed. Barry’s own perspective alongside that of two of the other women captures the nightmare of social media and email harassment, which surveys show is primarily experienced by women and girls, coming from men and boys.

Women are regularly told to just mute the usually anonymous perpetrators and delete the abuse, but as Barry says, “You can block someone, or mute them, but that only gives you an illusion of control.” And yes, leaving or spending less time on social media is one potentially helpful step, she acknowledges. “But people choosing to step away from having a voice on social media is entirely different from being silenced because of the treatment you get online.”

A discussion with trans woman Aoife Martin helpfully offers a balanced look into how a social media presence may attract trolls and abuse, but also provide valued and vital friendships, community and support. Barry also sensitively explores an unbearably tragic outcome of internet bullying in an interview with Dubliner Jackie Fox, mother of Nicole (Coco), a young woman who took her own life in 2018 after a barrage of online abuse. Jackie’s indomitable campaigning led to the passing in 2021 of “Coco’s Law”, which broadened Irish law to include the crime of online harassment.

Other strong segments are Barry’s interviews with Irish experts on how the pandemic became the basis for new vectors of mis- and disinformation, often using messaging platform WhatsApp (one interviewee, Aoife Gallagher, has written a good book, Web of Lies, on such developments), and the concluding chapter’s interviews with inner-city residents suffering, but sometimes benefiting from, the transformation of the Silicon Docks area of Dublin. Barry also elicits nuanced discussion from young Black Irish men, and Fiona Ryan, the White Irishwoman in the mixed race family featured in a Lidl ad that became a racist trigger point. But she misses the opportunity to examine Irish online racism more comprehensively, across other identities (why no interviews with some of those who first raised awareness on this, such as writer Una Minh Kavanagh or former Dublin mayor Hazel Chu?).

The book’s notable weakness is its early-draft look and feel, in both writing and content. Choosing a conversational style doesn’t excuse making a reader tussle with odd sentence constructions, mixed verb tenses, passive sentences, vagueness or cliches. A good subeditor would have been a boon.

On more substantive points, sometimes minor details are footnoted while big assumptions or sweeping statements are offered without supporting evidence – that the internet was designed by its pioneers for anonymity, for example. It very much wasn’t, hence the long-standing international battles for privacy rights and data protections. And there’s a persistent failure to differentiate “the internet” (which is infrastructure) from the companies and platforms that use it to ply their technologies and social media wares. Missing this point confuses some big issues, not least that problems do not stem from “the internet” per se but how companies utilise it, what they are permitted or willing to do, and our decision, as consumers, to accept the Faustian trade-off of “free” for data surveillance and weak protections. These are not minor side points but the root of the problems highlighted by the book. Algorithms don’t exist in isolation.

A curious contradiction of the book is Barry’s personal focus on Twitter, which may be deeply important to Barry and, indeed, to most journalists, but only around a fifth of Irish people use it, and though she repeatedly dismisses Facebook (a “damp squib”) and blogging as yesteryear’s obsessions, almost every example of harm in the book involves not Twitter, but other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. And blogging is not expiring, but booming, thanks to platforms like Medium and Substack.

It’s not quite clear who the intended audience is, as some Irish, online and technology basics are explained, while others are not. For example, Barry never clearly explains what an influencer is and does, even though the first three chapters are about influencers. A lack of awareness about tech figures shows, too, at domestic and international level. Irishman Brian Honan is described vaguely as a “security expert” but she’d have strengthened the impact and integrity of the interview by noting – as his, ahem, Twitter profile states – that he’s CEO of a security consultancy, head of Ireland’s Computer Security Incident Response Team and a former special adviser on cybersecurity to Europol. And American Mike Masnick, described as merely ‘a writer for Techdirt’, is the well-known, internationally influential founder of Techdirt, a pioneering, hugely impactful, erm, blog.

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This is the third technology-focused book from a big Irish publishing division I’ve read in the past six months that is topical, has good intentions, and offers some excellent detail but which is ultimately let down by limp editing and a consequent rushed-to-publication feel. Technology subjects seem particularly underserved in this way by Irish publishers. That’s a disservice to readers, to writers whose talent would shine with firmer editorial support, and to technology as a serious subject of national and global impact.