Web 1.0: ‘Hot or Not’ versus Cyberfeminism

Web 1.0 is a new six part series from The Irish Times that looks at the origins of the modern internet. We talk to everyone from coders to astrologers and pornographers to hear the stories of people who were there and designed the methods of communications that we all use today.

This episode looks at how, for a period of time, the new online world posed a real challenge to the patriarchy. And how some of the people who helped support the patriarchy did so unwittingly.

The episode also explores how those early battles fed into the development of the online world we are familiar with today.

Recent research from the University of Chicago titled When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media” found that “64% of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence. Clearly, users are spending time on apps that are not giving them a positive return.

The study showed that students would be willing to switch their social media off, for a fee of €59 - but that fee would drop if their friends had to switch theirs off, too.

In other words, their experience of social media was often negative - but would be even more negative if they were deprived of the use social media and their friends weren’t.

This is what they call the “social media trap”, where the only thing worse than being on social media is being excluded from it. It’s particularly acute among younger women on social media.

According to Instagram’s own research, one in four teenage girls in the UK say the app makes them feel worse about themselves.

This episode looks looks at how we ended up with systems that are so corrosive to our mental health.

This podcast was made by Enda O’Dowd with help from John Casey and Declan Conlon. Artwork by Paul Scott. Music by Kirk Osamayo and Sergey Cheremisinov