More4 News reports on the Gaydar revolution
Labour MP Chris Bryant is among the contributors to a report to be broadcast tomorrow examining how the internet has fundamentally changed gay society.
Benjamin Cohen, Channel 4 News technology correspondent and founding editor of PinkNews.co.uk, explores how Gaydar and similar websites have revolutionised what it means to be gay in Britain.
The report is part of a series to be screened on More4 News this week, celebrating 10 years since the dot.com boom.
The Gaydar report, to be shown tomorrow evening, asks if the shrinking of the gay scene and the social impact of “hooking up online” has led to the commoditisation of sexual relationships and an increase in sexually transmitted diseases.
Former Gaydar user and Labour MP Chris Bryant, Gaydar director David Muniz and the playwright Matthew Todd feature in the report.
Mr Bryant was revealed to be a user of Gaydar in 2003, when The Sun ran pictures of him posing in his underwear obtained through the site.
Prior to joining Channel 4 News, Benjamin Cohen was an internet entrepreneur, founding JewishNet/soJewish while at school.
Before sitting his A-levels, Cohen’s company had received the backing of a major investment bank together with funding to merge the company with the offline publication The Jewish News.
The combined entity then reversed onto the London Stock Exchange Alternative Investment Market, making Cohen, for a day, the youngest ever director of a public company.
He later completed an overnight, oversubscribed institutional fund-raising for CyberBritain, a search and data marketing company.
Hit by the dot.com bust, he went to university and later wrote a column on e-commerce for the TimesOnline and founded PinkNews.co.uk.
The first report, entitled 1998, will be broadcast tonight.
In it Cohen will look back at the events that led to the dot.com boom and how life in Britain has never been the same again.
Delving into the archives, he will look back at his own role within the dot.com boom and subsequent bust.
The report will also include contributions from web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and Professor Ian Angell of the London School of Economics.
Finally Ownership and Control, to be broadcast on Thursday evening, compares the development of the internet to the division of land into enclosed, private areas, controlled by the few to control the masses.
Analysing the future of the internet, Cohen is again joined by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and Professor Ian Angell of the London School of Economics.
