Extremely Online
The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet
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4.1 • 14 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Acclaimed reporter Taylor Lorenz, founder of User Magazine and host of the Power User podcast, presents an “enlightening history” (Associated Press) 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. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.
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 have resulted in 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 “terrific” (The New York Times Book Review) inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From the original mommy bloggers to the short-lived “pivot to video,” Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz documents the biggest online moments from the early 2000s through now in this fascinating history of social media. Lorenz charts the momentous highs—and embarrassing lows—of media platforms from Facebook to X (formerly known as Twitter). Focusing on both founders and users, it’s like a greatest-hits tour of the internet, with all the one-hit wonders you thought you’d forgotten. We loved the amusing anecdotes sprinkled throughout, like how early sponsored blog posts ended up with NSFW titles like “Hairy Vagina,” and we were fascinated to learn about the meteoric rise of “normal” people from all backgrounds becoming huge celebrities—sometimes against their will. There’s no doubt the internet is the most disruptive shift we’ve seen in our lifetimes, and Lorenz goes into well-researched depth on, well, all of it. Prepare to devour Extremely Online.
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
Nothing Groundbreaking
I don’t know. It was alright. I mean I’ve already lived through the launches of all these things. Wish it went deeper.