Extremely Online
The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
'A terrific history of the online creator economy.' The New York Times
'This book is about a revolution. It has radically upended how we've understood and interacted with our world. It has demolished traditional barriers and empowered millions who were previously marginalized. It has created vast new sectors of our economy, while devastating legacy institutions. It is often dismissed by traditionalists as a vacant fad, when in fact it is the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism.'
Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet-revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off.
For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy.
By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms' power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It's the real social history of the internet.
Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations created a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.
Extremely Online is the inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This astute debut from Lorenz, a Washington Post technology columnist, traces the tumultuous history of social media from the early 2000s to the present. She describes how such platforms as Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter evolved from the humblest of beginnings, noting that YouTube launched as a dating site in 2005 before broadening its focus. The internet, she explains, afforded new modes of audience interaction and forced legacy outlets to "rewrite" their playbooks, with blogs enabling "real-time interaction between writers and readers through comments sections" and sparking national publications to hire popular bloggers and buy their sites. Lorenz also covers how technological advancements drove new social media platforms; for instance, the advent of cellphones capable of recording video led to the rise of Snapchat, Vine, and Musical.ly, now known as TikTok. Lorenz accomplishes the difficult feat of wrangling a cogent narrative out of the unruliness of social media, while offering smart insight into how platforms affect their users. For instance, she suggests that the "pursuit of shareable content often seems more urgent than the desire to actually do the thing that will be recorded and shared," observing that some January 6 insurrectionists appeared "more interested in documenting their violent ransacking of the Capitol than they did in overthrowing American democracy." It's a powerful assessment of how logging on has changed the world.
Customer Reviews
Excellent
A wonderfully written and engaging history.
OK Boomer
3.5 stars
The author is an American journalist who writes on internet culture for WaPo, the ‘Washington Post’ for the uninitiated.
Here, she traces the development of modern social media and influencer culture from its “earliest days” which, to a dinosaur like me, seems like yesterday, but to Gen Alpha is the dark (i.e. pre-iPhone) ages.
Despite having zero social media presence, I had heard of some of what is described (people, places, platforms), albeit in considerably less detail. A good thing, in retrospect. That having been said, Ms Lorenz writes clearly with only limited editorial comment, mainly in the latter stages. She seemed particularly exercised by the demise of ‘Vine,’ and waxed lyrical about ‘Tumblr’ without elucidating its role in the emergence/dissemination of what I’ll refer to, for want of a better description, as modern gender ideology. If she did, I missed it. Or perhaps it didn’t happen. Maybe both.
A useful summary for a boomer like me, although I can’t imagine “the young folk” would find it particularly illuminating. Unless one had a lot of money to start with (the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, sundry rappers etc), I still don’t understand how one becomes a successful “influencer” as distinct from a wannabe, and suspect the shelf life is short even if you land an advertising contract.