Cork writer publishes book about Irish people's addiction to online

I WOULDN’T be surprised if, in 100 years’ time, people looked back at this period and wondered what was going on with social media.

So says Cork’s Aoife Barry, who has recently published her first book Social Capital, which paints a portrait of “a country addicted to the internet, refreshing the news, refreshing Twitter, scrolling and scrolling towards a feverish future”.

Far from being preachy, she turns an equally honest eye on her own life online, from her humble beginnings using dial-up in her parents’ kitchen in Douglas to working for Ireland’s first digital-only newsroom, (TheJournal.ie), and asks what we bargain in exchange for life in the metaverse.

It’s a provocative piece of journalism – at times unsettling, insightful but also funny – where she explores 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.

The idea behind Social Capital, she says, is to take stock of where we are online right now, so that together we can figure out where to go in the future.

“Since my first teenage forays online (which usually involved the pre-Google search engine AltaVista to find chat rooms), I’ve been fascinated by the good and the bad of how people behave on the internet,” says Aoife.

“It was exciting to get the opportunity thanks to HarperCollins Ireland to speak to other people about their lives and experiences online, and to delve deeper into the most pertinent and controversial internet behaviour affecting people in Ireland – from bullying to transphobia, harassment to influencing,” she said.

And where are we right now?

“Well, instead of dipping our toe in social media, now we’re in the water and we’re trying to wade back to the bank and drag ourselves out of the water,” she says. “It’s like you have to pull yourself off social media, rather than choose to go on it.”

Sharing a snapshot from 2021, she writes: “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.”

She looks at how social media is now a place of influence, where you can become a brand yourself and start a career based on just being you.

“It’s a place where users follow the lives of everyday people, and where apps have as a result begun pushing users to shop as they scroll.

“I look too at how anonymity, an integral part of life online, has become a fraught topic in the discussion of the future of social media. It enables cyberbullying and harassment, has been linked to the deaths of young people, and it has allowed the worst sorts of harms – racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism – to ferment across every social platform available. And yet it has also given people the freedom to be themselves, and to discover a new way of expression, a sense of liberty.”

Aoife shares her own harrowing experience of online harassment in the book, which in 2019 led to a man referred to as BOD being jailed for three years for harassing herself and five other women.

She writes: “I stopped saying in advance on social media if I was going to an event. Even a night out could be spoiled by his need to let me know he was following me around online. When I did have to say I was doing an event, because I was a guest or interviewer, I wondered if he would be in the crowd. I had no idea what he looked like, but I knew he lived in Dublin because of things he’d said in the emails.”

Because she didn’t know who was targeting her, Aoife said it was easy to imagine really terrible things happening to her.

“It was disturbing,” she remembers. At one point BOD emailed her personal email account.

“This new move felt violating, as he had gone beyond the tacit boundary that separated my work life from my personal life,” she writes.

“That brought with it a fear of what the remnants of my earlier days online could provide him. Of how easy it was to follow my journey around the space of the internet for almost two decades, when I hadn’t ever thought anyone would follow me around. I thought of the hours I had blithely posted personal thoughts on forums, and was glad that I’d never said anything too revealing which might pop up in a Google search. But I didn’t know how careful I’d been.”

Despite what she went through, Aoife said that going to the gardaí and for them to go to the courts felt like a “big way of dealing with it. And I find that aspect troubling, that there was no in-between way of getting it to stop.”

She also talks about misinformation online and “sneaky content that’s presented as real”.

“A lot of people can make money from your attention, so realising if you need to do some reading about things, having literacy around social media is helpful. It’s a lot of pressure on you as a user, companies are not solving these problems right now. There’s pressure on us to moderate our time and knowledge, and that’s difficult.”

The book is dedicated to Kieran, her stepdad who died last October. Her father also passed away not long after.

“It was a really challenging time, I’m still going through the grieving process. It was a life-changing experience, as it is for everyone who has lost a parent, and I learned that, while it’s a universal experience, it’s also such a unique experience. 

"It makes you assess your life, be appreciative of your family, and time you have on the planet.”

Aoife, in her late 30s, is the eldest of four siblings and with only a few years between them, they’re a close knit – and successful – bunch. Her sister Laura is the best-selling autor of Gaff Goddess and Décor Galore; Stephanie is a travel blogger (‘ StephMyLife’ with nearly 85k followers on Instagram), and her brother Nik is a psychologist and a DJ. She says they get their creativity from their mum.

“Our parents always encouraged us to do whatever we were interested in. I don’t come from a family that there was pressure to be ‘successful’ and I always felt so supported. I never set out to be this or that, I always just wanted to write and do things that I really love, and it’s worked out that way.”

After spending 12 years as assistant news editor at TheJournal.ie, Aoife has recently embarked on a freelancing career.

“I loved The Journal, they were like my second family but I wanted to do more writing of my own and it felt like the time was right.”

And she revealed she’s already at the very early stages of a novel based in Dublin: “It’s a whole new world for me!”

We’re already looking forward to it.