The owners of Stardoll preemptively banned any words like “boob” or “sex” that may have been a bit too mature for their audience. Fortunately, for the sake of me being able to look Aisling in the eye ever again, I found no evidence of flirty messages on her account. However, not all of the messages were that innocent.

What parents did not know about StardollĪdmittedly, most of the messages exchanged between young users were like the generic texts you receive from your small cousin who just got their first phone for Christmas. It’s obvious now where Aisling lifted the WARNING I AM A CRAZY CHICK graphics from. Source: Ash Tray There were clubs for people with mutual interests to connect, for example Hot-People911 was a group for hot people to join. Whatever your parents feared you were doing online, they never would have guessed that you would have had these terrible rhymes, nationalist sentiments and references to Pussycat Dolls songs on your profile. All of the random poems people used to fill up their pages with (mind your eyes this is actually painful to read for too long) Here we see that Aisling, like many others, used that feature to try get boys (very few of which actually used the website) to send her gifts. It was common practice to spend a ‘Stardollar’ (the sites currency) to gift roses to other users. Thank you Aisling for being so open about your past.Ģ006 was a time when Lost was at it’s peak popularity and it was acceptable to list your favourite foods and fizzy drinks in a bio on a social networking site. Let’s run through some of the best parts of Aisling’s profile, that are secretly embarrassingly familiar to the rest of us. Very few parents realised that this website was actually a social networking site and not just a vapid dress up game. Her profile has conserved some of the garish and tacky stylistic techniques for composing a bio that were typical of the time.įor many kids who weren’t allowed on Bebo, Stardoll was a perfect alternative. Social media accounts like this are something of a cultural artifact now that all evidence of contemporary sites like Bebo has been erased. The account is now eleven years old, which is the age that Aisling was when she made it.

This is Aisling (Ash Tray) McDonnell, an Irish artist who has offered me complete access to her perfectly preserved Stardoll account.

In reality, for a lot of Irish kids it facilitated pretty much all of the online behaviour that your parents told you not to engage in. ON THE OUTSIDE Stardoll (or Paperdoll Heaven as it’s known to the real veterans), was a harmless, innocent online dress up game typically played by eleven year old girls.