Social Capital: Life online in the shadow of Ireland’s tech boom

Snapshot of a Life Online

1991

You’re eight years old and the telephone in your house is the most important communication device around. The information you get comes from the radio, TV, books, your parents, friends. You’re too young for newspapers, and anyway, they’re just too big to read. You know that in the evening the TV newsreaders with serious faces and padded shoulders will tell you what’s happening in the world. Right after the Angelus rings out at 6 p.m., the important news will come.

Ireland has its first woman president. The big pop song that year is called ‘Shiny Happy People’, but the news is filled with sad stories, and words you like the sound of: Birmingham, Gorbachev, Dubrovnik, Maastricht.

You don’t know it, but a thing called the World Wide Web has recently been invented, meaning computers can now communicate with each other in a new way. The word ‘web’ makes you think of spiders and the glistening threads they entwine: beautiful, but with a dark purpose woven through them.

2001

You’re eighteen and about to do your Leaving Cert exams. You’re sure that every job you apply for as an adult will require telling an employer your results. You know the internet exists. For a while, you could only use it at a friend’s house. You’d eat Pringles and then wipe the milky potato dust off your hands to type ‘chat rooms’ into Alta Vista. But recently your family got a computer and put it in the kitchen. Now you can go online in the morning, the evening, and after school. It has a noisy modem, but you don’t mind the sound because it feels like you’re entering a portal to somewhere new and exciting.

There is an incomprehensible amount of information online, but you just search for photos of the grunge band Silverchair, or visit chat rooms. You talk to faceless Australian men who email you afterwards. They write ‘LOL’ a lot and you wonder why they are telling you they love you.

You send your first email with an attachment and wonder how many hours it will take to arrive. Last year was the millennium. You had secretly wished the Y2K bug would strike all computers at the stroke of midnight, just to make things exciting. But nothing exciting happened.

2011

You’ve started working at a digital-only news publication which would not exist without the invention of high-speed broadband and Wi-Fi. Your smartphone lets you go on the internet whenever you want. You no longer have to fight with your sisters and brother at home about using the telephone and cutting out the internet. But all new things soon become quotidian, so this phase has stopped feeling exciting. It feels normal.

Your social life is recorded and catalogued through Facebook. It’s the latest in a string of websites that have become central to not just your social life but your way of thinking about yourself and the world. First there was MySpace and Bebo. Before them were the forums. Online, you can read people’s words and feel moved or appalled by them; you can share moments of connection; you can feel part of a fandom. You wonder, though, about the negativity that can seep in – the complicated characters you bump into online who make you feel on edge, or weird. It feels a small price to pay, though, for all of this novelty and possibility.

You used to write a music blog, but now you only blog occasionally because you’ve joined Twitter, which is a site made up entirely of status updates. It sounds laughable, but the whole world happens on there.

The country is in a recession and people have been emigrating to as near as London and as far away as Australia. Some of your friends work for the companies who run the biggest internet sites in the world. Everyone working for Google seems to live in apartments right by the office. The jobs there are like jobs from the future: free food, free gym, free beer, nap pods.

In a year’s time, you will start getting emails from someone with the initials BOD. You don’t know them, but they will follow you around the internet, emailing you comments, sending you photos they took from your social media accounts. You will think, is this just what it’s like to be online? Before the decade’s end, you’ll discover you’re not the only one who’s been getting emails from BOD.

2021

You wonder if this will be the year you finally get control over the time you spend online. Sometimes it feels like if you’re not on social media, you might as well not be alive. Your phone goes everywhere with you, like it does for everyone. People don’t joke about ‘smartphone addiction’ anymore. The internet is for arguing with people about who offends who most over what. People who are seen as caring too much online used to be called ‘snowflakes’, as if they were so fragile, they could melt. Now sometimes people wonder if everyone cares too much, if there are just too many opinions jostling for space on social media. Reading the online discourse gives you a feeling of cynicism that sits like a jagged rock in your stomach.

Twitter is now one of the most influential and infuriating websites in the world. Facebook is a shrine to your youth and you avoid visiting it as much as you can. You’re living through a global pandemic. At the start of it, you received messages from strangers forwarded to you by friends, warning of lockdowns and telling you to stock up on food. You see lies and mistruths spreading across social media and WhatsApp, stories about ‘plandemics’ concocted by shadowy government figures and billionaires.

People cope with the pandemic by filming themselves dancing on a new app, TikTok. You open TikTok and flick through videos about losing weight, teenagers dancing, jacked-up young men talking about ways to cook oats and make sourdough. You’re told that the app gets to know you so well that eventually it will show you exactly what you want to see. You only use it intermittently so it doesn’t get to know you well enough to do that.

New legislation is brought in so people can be prosecuted for cyber-bullying, or sharing nude photos without consent. Both of these things happen online all the time now.

BOD, the emailer, has been jailed for harassing you and five other women online. He is released after three years. His emails changed how you interact with the internet forever. You wonder, if everyone who’d been harassed online retreated, who would end up making the internet their home?

You watch as influencers influence, war breaks out, people fight, memes are made, tech billionaires toy with their power, and life goes on.

Introduction

We know that life moves fast on the internet, but sometimes its changes can be so swift, they are discombobulating. As I was putting the finishing touches to this book, Twitter – one of my most-visited social media sites, and one of the world’s most controversial apps – appeared to be undergoing an unexpected and shattering revolution. Things had already been changing in recent years in the world of social media. Facebook had been the first such site to herald a new evolution of online communication, an American website set up by nerdy Harvard students which went global. It moved relationships online beyond the innocent days of MySpace, Friendster and Bebo, and into a more exciting, interconnected world where social media was soon less of a choice than a necessity. While the early social media sites were platforms, Facebook showed that they could build themselves into infrastructure: essential for people, businesses, celebrities, politicians, and families.

This was inspirational to a generation of young, enthusiastic and power-seeking tech entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley was the incubator for attempts at following Facebook’s lead. Two major creations that emerged to capture global attention were the photo-based Instagram (later bought by Facebook) and microblogging site Twitter. They blossomed to the point where, like Facebook, they became embedded in everyday life. Collectively, these three companies – alongside the behemoth YouTube, the youth-oriented app Snapchat, and the hugely popular site Reddit – showed that the internet was a place where clever people could set up websites that would do more than connect people. In this new frontier, the founders could become billionaires; their sites could have cultural, political and social power; their origin story could even be turned into a Hollywood movie, as happened when David Fincher made The Social Network, about Facebook.

But every story, every narrative, has to have its points of conflict, its moments of peril. These had been occurring quite frequently for Facebook in particular, with a series of crises and controversies dogging it for a number of years from the mid-2010s. Even if Twitter and Instagram weren’t saddled with as much constant criticism and scandal as Facebook, they too were the focus of concern over how they moderated content and what their impact was on their users. By the cusp of the 2020s, the carefree early days of social media felt like a moment of collective naivety – were we all really so stupid as to think that these sites and apps, connecting so many strangers around the world, and helmed by extremely rich tech bros in love with capitalism and at home in the corridors of power, would not lead to issues on both individual and societal levels?

Us users, devoid of real power when it came to what these sites, apps and companies could do, had to grudgingly accept that social media was not created simply to allow us to catch up with news or private message crushes: these sites were set up to make money, and our every click, like, and friend request was a coin dropping into a CEO’s source of income. We had to realize that nothing, indeed, was free, and that we were the product. By the late 2010s journalists, academics and intellectuals were teasing apart exactly what that meant. How could we keep hooked into the internet, and all of the useful, titillating and life-changing content it provided us, while being cognisant of what it was taking from us, too? Books like Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism showed us exactly how our data kept companies like Google and Facebook making money; The Shallows by Nicholas Carr asked the uncomfortable question about what on earth the latest iteration of the always-on internet was doing to our brains.

These questions, and their varied answers, fermented away for a few years. Then came the early 2020s. While Facebook was the main site that kept getting into trouble, a change of ownership at Twitter showed that there might be an appetite out there among users for serious change when it came to how they interacted on social media. The future for this arena was looking rough, and none of the questions created by its existence were being answered – they were just being joined by even more thorny queries. When I started to write Social Capital in 2021, Twitter wasn’t having a good time, but I wasn’t to know it would be the site to show what sort of social media future people desired – and how hard it would be to reach tech utopia. The site was, by this time, known by many of its own users as a ‘hellsite’. It had started off as a place to gather and share short, pithy posts, called tweets. Twitter had a similar origin story to Facebook, Instagram, et al.: a group of forward-thinking tech-obsessed men had created a new way to communicate online, and became rich while doing it. It was a symbol of the possibility of tech ideas, of disruption, of levelling the world of news and connection.

When I first joined Twitter, just like all the other social media sites I’d joined over the years, it had felt intimate and even cosy. There were distinct communities, and I was part of ‘Irish Twitter’ from 2008 on, a self-defined community of people who lived in or were from Ireland. Things felt local, but that feeling of locality gradually faded as the years went on and celebrities, brands, news outlets, politicians, trolls, and corporations realized that broadcasting your thoughts on Twitter had heft and power. It became more than a place to just share your thoughts. Like Facebook, it had shown the power of the internet to connect people. But unlike any other social media site, it had really shone at moments when it mattered to have people openly sharing their experiences, like during the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter protests, the MeToo movement and the invasion of Ukraine. On a smaller level, it became an essential site during hyper-local events like when Storm Emma hit Ireland. It let people post about personal, sometimes even inconsequential things, and have them become meaningful by being read and responded to by other people. The ‘main character’ on Twitter changed day to day. Sometimes its high points, where it felt like everyone on there was talking about the exact same thing, had one leg in absurdity, like the day everyone was tweeting about David Cameron and a pig, or the weeks of arguments over whether a dress was blue or not.

While Facebook was groundbreaking in how it connected people on a grand and intimate scale, Twitter seemed to be the dream of the internet come to life, where anyone from anywhere could post anything at any time and there would be someone to witness it. It built on what the previous social media sites had created, and through providing an open forum for dialogue and shared experience, it began to give people a voice that could be easily amplified. That in turn brought about actual change, as Twitter allowed users to communicate directly with politicians and powerful people. Voices that weren’t normally heard could be shared on the site in a different way from other social networks. Companies and brands had to reckon with instant customer service feedback; countless news stories were broken on there.

But within a few years, Twitter had become a site with global reach which was owned by a company that was struggling to make an acceptable profit. The user experience was becoming uncomfortable. Ads cluttered Twitter feeds; negative and abusive comments could be sent easily; moderation had to be ramped up but never felt sufficient. The atmosphere on Twitter both reflected and heightened the darkness of the world outside, as Trump’s election, Brexit, the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the climate crisis and multiple other major news events were broadcast, outlined, discussed and debated on there. Misinformation sprung up easily. Scrolling through Twitter began to feel like self-harm of the mental kind. It genuinely made people feel bad. But it was too hard to stay away. The whole world seemed to be happening in its 280-character slots (even though if you weren’t on Twitter, it didn’t really matter – it was in many ways its own bubble). We needed to know what was going on, and we could find out right there. Every last disturbing thing.

Then came Elon Musk. The South African billionaire, who always seems to wear the smirk of someone who knows he has more power and money than you, was riding high on the success of his company Space X, and the mashup of success and criticism garnered by his electric vehicle company Tesla. The ebullient Musk was prone to making dashed-off major pronouncements on Twitter, but in a tone that could be read as ‘Just joking!’ if he changed his mind (which he sometimes did). When he announced he was going to buy Twitter and change it for the better, it seemed like a stunt. But he made the purchase – before rapidly trying to reverse his decision. Eventually, he was forced by a court into completing the sale, for $44 billion. [1] The next thing Twitter users knew, a guy who often posted uncredited memes, and who was sympathetic to conservative and right-leaning viewpoints, was the new boss of the place where they spent much of their internet time. Within days, Musk had fired half of Twitter’s staff, including staff in Ireland, and was making plans to monetize membership of the free site. [2] The symbolism of a billionaire buying a company, sacking its board, and then setting fire to whatever he disliked was a stunning display of late-stage capitalism and techno-dystopia.

Days after Twitter’s layoffs were announced came layoffs at Meta, Facebook’s parent company. More layoffs followed at other important tech companies. The veneer of steady progress and power on the tech world’s reputation was starting to tarnish. As soon as Musk was confirmed as Twitter’s new owner, my feed became populated with people waving goodbye, pledging not to forget the good old days. The genuinely emotional reactions – people were angry, sad and nostalgic – put paid to the old criticisms about social media only being a place for sharing photos of your lunch, or posting solipsistic updates about your boring life. Yes, users did both of those but the threat of things ending showed that people got something from Twitter; they made proper friendships and relationships, they cared about what happened there. People tweeted about leaving Twitter, or at least contemplating leaving it. Some were packing up their thoughts and moving on to new digital locations which they hoped weren’t run by a billionaire running riot. I was sceptical about their claims, given Twitter’s power, but thought it best to sign up to at least one alternative to secure my user name.

I joined Mastodon, which was having such a heavy influx of new members that it had to undertake funding drives to keep up with the demand. Mastodon is made up of servers which are independently owned and run. As Mastodon explained on its Twitter account while trying to entice people to dump Musk’s new playground: ‘Why choose Mastodon? Because it’s decentralized and open-source, it can’t be sold and won’t go bankrupt. It respects your privacy and gives control over the network to the people. It’s a product on top of a protocol, the way Twitter should have been.’ [3] The world of servers and decentralization can sound like confusing jargon, but essentially it means that on Mastodon you can choose distinct and discrete communities to join – each one on a different server – so although there can be some crossover between servers, there will never be a truly unified experience, unlike on Twitter, where the more members it gained, the more it felt like a global market. Mastodon claimed to have a better way of solving one of social media’s biggest problems, moderation, by making server owners pledge to undertake ‘active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia’. But as membership grew, it was clear the same types of moderation issues might end up plaguing Mastodon servers too.

On Mastodon, I was handed something I hadn’t experienced online in many years: a blank social media slate. I was a newborn. But as I clicked ‘follow’ on people’s accounts, and watched my follower count rise, I realized that the slate had already been half filled in. It was déjà vu: I spotted many of the same names and avatars as on Twitter. The vibe was like Irish Twitter in the early days, when it was less populous and people felt the stirring excitement of novelty, mixed with the feel of an internet forum or bulletin board in the Noughties. Back then, we felt like the online space in which we spent time was intimate and private, within our control. But it also held huge potential, both for individual users and the space itself. It felt like new ground was being broken just by being there.

So it turned out, then, that the future of social media was the past. Twitter’s new evolution, with a suspicious ‘baddie’ at the helm, seemed to be forcing a revolution. It was making people think about how they were spending their time on social media, jarring them out of their routine and making them face up to questions that had been niggling at them. People were asking what the ideal social media experience was, and whether it was possible to even get there. While people had often threatened to leave, or did leave, Facebook during its moments of crisis, this felt different. Now, there were genuine alternatives – like Mastodon – to retreat to. Twitter users were rising up and choosing to go somewhere else. And they were choosing to go backwards.

The online locations they wanted to step into were not radical, newly imagined websites that had crashed the code of old. They aimed to do things like we used to back in the early days of the internet, only a little simpler. Mastodon was not concerned with making things go viral, or enabling users to become famous. It wanted to dampen down Twitter and Facebook’s habits of shouting out opinions and racking up the shares and followers. Hush now, it seemed to say to its members, let’s just take things slow. It appeared to want to foster consideration and contemplation, two words which seemed anathema to online life in 2022.

Looking back over social media’s previous two decades, I was not surprised to see people deciding to turn back to what they once knew, to when there were fewer people around, less noise. To when an online space felt personal and humble. What working on this book has shown me was what I had suspected: that life online had meant holding onto intertwined threads that users were desperately trying to unpick. They hadn’t even spotted how they were coming together, as they were spun by every keystroke and like. The threads were made up of a feeling of excitement about a means of expression and connection; the joy of learning new things and finding kinship; the exasperation and anxiety as more negativity, trolling and targeted behaviour emerged on the sites they used; the desire to be on the very sites that had started to repel them, as they provided essential and enlightening information. All of the biggest social networks were having and creating problems of their own. Twitter had just forced people to face up to things suddenly.

By 2022, Facebook, once the star of the social networking scene – the big brother who made it possible for website founders to become genuinely powerful people whose creations could both entertain and corrupt – was a damp squib, lost in a sea of irrelevance and mistrust. Long buried in the digital graveyard were the simpler days of Bebo and MySpace. Instagram, owned by Meta, had evolved from a photo-sharing hub into a commercially oriented site of influence, though its users still clung to it like an old life raft that could puncture at any stage. People had embraced messaging apps as new ways of connecting, like WhatsApp (owned by Meta) and Telegram. YouTube still had a mysterious monetization policy and an irritating algorithm, but pumped out new vlogging stars easily. And bulldozing through it all was TikTok, the Chinese-owned app that was chaotic, addictive, and scaring its competitors witless.

It was not a surprise to see that in order to find some calm amidst the digital chaos, to step out of a social media world that was barrelling on faster and faster without a thought for its members, users were stepping backwards. They were deliberately aiming themselves towards a new-slash-older version of the social internet, a small-scale one which promised less virality and novelty. But I wondered to myself, given all that had gone before, how much of the past online we are doomed to recreate. Although it seemed that sites like Mastodon were aware of what had gone wrong, they were also trying to deal with managing millions of members, and in doing so would face some of the same issues that faced the commercial behemoths. But the newer independent sites had the gift of awareness, which the earlier internet pioneers didn’t have.

What the ground-breaking internet voyagers did have was hope. Back in the Sixties and Seventies when the early internet ideas were being dreamed up, it was a time of cultural and political change. Anything was possible: you could push back against old ideas and traditions, and begin to dream up something fresh. The internet had its roots in the New Left and counterculture movements that emerged in the US, which espoused a new way of envisaging the world and people’s relationship to it. [4] As Tim Berners-Lee recalls in his memoir Weaving the Web , the internet pioneers believed an egalitarian web of information could be created, and that humans would do good with it. [5] Or at least do something interesting with it, if they couldn’t be good. Today, we talk about the beliefs of these pioneers as if they come from an ancient era, but they were experimenting with brave ideas less than half a century ago.

Those ideas born in the US were disseminated across the world. Here in Ireland, men and women set up internet societies and gave away CD-ROMs in the Nineties so that others could experience the wonder of the internet too. Even though some people didn’t understand what they were doing, these enthusiasts did it because the net meant potential for a new world with new rules. But they have had to watch as their dreams warped into a hallucination of sorts. The spirit of the early days of the internet was ‘frontier stuff’, Niall Murphy, an Irish internet pioneer, tells me. He has an entire website dedicated to the history of the Irish internet, from the first service providers in the Nineties, to the college societies that birthed a generation of internet evangelists, to the first online Irish businesses. [6] When it comes to the power of the internet to bring change, he describes it as being a wedge for Ireland loosening out of the inflexible place it was in in the Eighties and Nineties, opening the country up to the world. ‘It’s access to another world in a very real way,’ he says of going online. But while the internet in Ireland grew up in a country that was itself growing up economically, Murphy saw that as things got bigger online, that didn’t mean they would get better online – they might well get worse. It was understood in those early days that people wanted community, and tech enabled them to gather together. It was about the individuals, not necessarily the internet providers and website founders. ‘But now, the situation we’re in, I feel the companies have inserted themselves into the human impulse to communicate,’ Murphy says. ‘And that impulse is turned on itself.’

Today, we’re never without self-consciousness because of social media, something he thinks is not only damaging, but wasn’t foreseen at the time that he and his peers were listening to the not-so-dulcet tones of dial-up. While the early days of the internet were about expansion, he describes the most recent years as being about shrinking possibilities and control. [7] He doesn’t regret his role in it, and says the people who built the infrastructure – whether due to ignorance, utopian outlook, or just because they’re human – weren’t thinking thirty years ahead. They simply weren’t to know where their creations would take them. I doubt they could have imagined the journey a site like Twitter or Facebook went on, and all the gold and mud that would be churned up by their evolution. ‘I wouldn’t make the mistake of saying the builders are unsullied by the consequences of their actions,’ says Murphy. ‘But I would say, if you go back to the pioneers and ask did you intend all of this?, they’d say no.’ They surely would not have envisaged that their work would have led to powerful social networks with millions of members and ties to politics and influence, and that this could all start to disintegrate as the users grew unhappy with what had been created for them.

Back in the Nineties and early Noughties, the internet could be dipped into. You were in control of how far you went. But within a handful of years, going online was like being half submerged all the time. It became an effort to wade over to the riverbank and drag yourself out. The stories of people who have experienced both the joys and harms that being online has had to offer since social media emerged in Ireland are the heart of this book. It’s not a story of good versus bad, or an attempt to get you to log off and reject social media entirely. It’s an exploration of what it is to be a person online right now, taking in some of the major internet moments in Ireland to illustrate what we’ve experienced and what we have – or haven’t – learned from it. One of the fascinating things about the internet is that each of us has our own singular experience of it. Each of us has our own personal social media feed that we consume; each of us reacts differently to what we see. It’s impossible to capture the experience of everyone online, but what we can do is look at the instances that point us in the direction of the greater stories we can tell about what social media has meant – and means – to us in Ireland.

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