Social Capital

 Social media has been shaping the lives of millions here in Ireland, and billions around the world over the last 3 decades. As each new platform has emerged, new rules for engaging and interacting with that platform have coloured how we view the world and altered how we interact with it. In Social Capital Aoife Barry dives deep into a well researched, provocative account of Ireland’s technology revolution, its promises and the human cost of this progress.

Part biographical, Barry talks about her own personal experiences and the subsiquent conviction of a man who had harassed her and 5 other women online saying in a recent Irish times article We weren’t real people [to him]. We were maybe avatars of the type of person that he disliked.

Barry paints a portrait of the country that is unsettling, funny and very insightful, from the contious refreshing of twitter, to communites uprooted by tech companys, to the tramatised moderators fighting to keep the internet safe at a horrible price.

A great read, this book looks at how we have collapsed the intersection between physical, digital and reality and where we might go from here.

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Who wrote it?
Aoife Barry

How does it come?
softback. Approx. 15.5 x 23 x 2 cm, 280 pages