Must-read books about social media and tech
Some inspiration and background reading for when I was writing Social Capital
During the early research and writing process for my book Social Capital, I found myself caught between reading other books about tech and social media, and wanting to avoid doing the same. It’s funny: when you write a book about a topic, you want to read everything related to it… but you also don’t want to be so inspired by other people’s work that you lose sight of your own.
As I was writing a book specifically about Irish social media, two touchstones for me - though they weren’t referenced in the text - were Róisín Kiberd’s excellent The Disconnect and Mary McGill’s insightful The Visibility Trap. I’m a long admirer of both of their writing, and owned their books already. I’m always so impressed by Kiberd’s revealing and critically astute writing, at how she can tell a story that’s so personal and yet through it make the reader reflect on a greater question. Like Social Capital, she writes about her early days online but goes on to interrogate her adult relationship with the internet too, while exploring trends like Vaporwave and the soul-sucking vibe of corporate tech conferences.
Mary McGill’s book The Visibility Trap is more academic and less personal, but looks at how social media encourages us to look and to be looked at, and what this can mean for our sense of self and self-esteem. McGill knows so much about this topic and has researched it for years - her work will only grow to be more important as we interrogate the role of social media in our lives. Both of their books showed me what was already happening in terms of analysis of Irish social media, and the gap where my work could fit.
There were a number of books that I read which made it into the references in Social Capital. But there were others that didn’t because their content wasn’t referenced in any way, but which maybe got me thinking about how to structure a book, or showed me how to approach an idea; others introduced me to concepts and facts which filled in knowledge gaps, or helped me make links between trends.
Here are some more of the books I’d recommend on the topics of tech, human behaviour and social media, and why.
Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles
While reading this book by Welsh interaction designer and technology ethicist Cennydd Bowles (full disclosure, Cennydd is friends with friends of mine, though we’ve only met a handful of times at Primavera) I found myself underlining lines constantly. There was just so much in this book that made sense. So many ideas - about regulation, dark patterns, legislation, privacy - being expressed clearly and cogently in a way that I was hungry for.
Technology is and never has been neutral, and Cennydd’s book explains why, and where we have to go from here. It’s a book about ethics in technology that is wonderfully readable, not dry and academic. It takes as its baseline the ideas that equity and equality online should be what we strive for, but also acknowledges the in-built human biases that make this difficult. And it makes you, the reader, rage at how inequality has been baked into the platforms we use daily, but also feel that if only people read books like this, they’d see that the solution is within us. It teaches some basic ethics theory too, in a way that didn’t make me feel utterly dim for not knowing it.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
I’m fascinated by the Silicon Valley origins of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The mindset of the people who created these sickeningly powerful behemoths is an education in what creates and maintains power these days. We can directly connect how people behave on the biggest social media platforms to the type of business world that incubated them. Anna Wiener worked for some years within a number of Silicon Valley tech start-ups, and her memoir is a smart, funny and ultimately terrifying glimpse into a world where rules are supposed to be broken and yet capitalism rules all.
It’s quite depressing to read about her desire to take part in a world that promised disruption, only to discover that it was actually the same ol’ boys club as in the ‘outside world’. Wiener is now a tech writer at The New Yorker, hopefully a much more encouraging place to work.
An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
If you want a juicy, well-reported and deeply-researched read about what Facebook was doing from the mid-aughts on, pick this up. Kang and Frenkel are New York Times journalists, so this is pacey reportage that shows exactly what went on behind the scenes at Facebook from 2016 - 2020. It demonstrates, as I go into in Social Capital, just how difficult it has been for the company to make moderation decisions, and how its relationships with high-profile people have been both important and damaging. It’s about a company that wants to feel like it’s doing good, but watches as harm is caused in the process.
I consulted this book during the writing process to confirm details, as Kang and Frenkel had some brilliant insiders giving them information. In fact, they held 1,000 hours of interviews with around 400 people, and this is why this book in particular shines. There are many ‘insider’-style tech books out there, but I really trust reporters of this calibre to not just get the juicy lines but also explain the context around people’s actions.
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Friers
I enjoyed this juicy read a whole lot - it combined insider gossip with excellent reporting, and a writing style that was critical without leaning into salaciousness. It has excellent insight into how Instagram helped create the influencing trend, and how it strayed far from its origins while it did that.
It also gives an insight into what it’s like when Meta (then Facebook) decides to take over a company, and how that can lead to frustrations for the old owners. Another book in this vein is Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton, which goes very in-depth into the early days of Odeo (the precursor to Twitter) and takes in some of the nascent blogging days too.
Behind The Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T Roberts
This is an excellent exploration of how content moderation emerged online and the many huge challenges facing platforms in the quest to balance ‘freedom of expression’ with ‘safety for users’. Roberts uses her own story as an early web user to share how commercial content moderation emerged from a more grassroots approach in the early internet days to become a giant problem today.
As I write of this book in Social Capital, she also brings up really important questions around how content moderators can be ‘othered’ when they are hired to moderate social media platforms tens of thousands of miles away.
Other books of note:
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. This is an absolute TOME of a book, and some of it was a little over my head, but the central argument - that social media platforms were able to suck up our data and create a new asset class out of it, and this has had bad results for all of us - along with the many, many examples of corporate greed, will stick with you. Hugely insightful analysis and a very distinct tone.
Silicon Docks: The Rise of Dublin as a Global Tech Hub by Pamela Newenham. This is a great collection of reports about the development of Silicon Docks - I particularly enjoyed its sections on how the IDA tempted Google and Twitter over to Ireland.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. This was written over eight years ago and yet it’s still embarrassingly relevant. I always enjoy Ronson’s offbeat yet spot-on approaches to how humans behave in the online world - he manages to retain a sense of empathy even when writing about troubling people and incidents. Some of the stories told include donglegate and the Jonah Lehrer plagiarism scandal. There’s so much nuance in this book… just what we tend to be missing when piling onto someone online.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. This novel. It turns a mirror on all of our behaviour online in the most embarrassing ‘it me!’ way. American poet and author Lockwood writes about a thing called ‘the portal’ (ie social media) through the eyes of a terminally-online young woman, and her observations are chilling. It’s also written like a collection of social media posts or updates. This isn’t unusual - fragmentary narratives have become particularly popular in the past decade, see books like The End We Start From by Megan Hunter and Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill for more - but in Lockwood’s hands the paragraphs read like cringeworthy posts we could all have written, mocked or screengrabbed ourselves. She truly is a wonder of a writer.
Social Capital is out in bookshops now, or you can buy it online here.
