Extremely online The untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet

Taylor Lorenz

Book - 2023

"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 p...ower. 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 inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us." --Amazon.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Simon & Schuster 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Taylor Lorenz (author)
Edition
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition
Physical Description
viii, 373 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 297 - 353) and index.
ISBN
9781982146863
  • Introduction: The Social Ranking
  • Part I. Online Influence Beginnings
  • Chapter 1. The Blogging Revolution
  • Chapter 2. The Mommy Bloggers
  • Chapter 3. The Friend Zone
  • Chapter 4. The New Celebrity
  • Part II. The First Creators
  • Chapter 5. The Rise of YouTube
  • Chapter 6. Creators Break Through
  • Part III. New Dynamics
  • Chapter 7. Twitter Follows Back
  • Chapter 8. Tumblr Famous
  • Chapter 9. Instagram's Influence
  • Part IV. The Platform Battles for Creators
  • Chapter 10. Vine Time
  • Chapter 11. A Tangle of Competitors, A New Era for Users
  • Chapter 12. Parallel Lines
  • Chapter 13. Counting Seconds
  • Chapter 14. The Shuffle
  • Part V. The Creator Boom
  • Chapter 15. The Winners
  • Chapter 16. Peak Instagram
  • Chapter 17. The Adpocalypse
  • Chapter 18. Breakdown and Burnout
  • Part VI. Influence Everywhere
  • Chapter 19. TikTok Dominates
  • Chapter 20. Unlocked
  • Chapter 21. The Scramble and the Sprawl
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Lorenz has been covering the twisted confluence of media and technology for her entire career. As a millennial journalist, she's lived all the ways that tech changed the way people connect and experienced firsthand how news and marketing have moved to the social media sphere. This book is a history of social media: its key players, insidious side effects, and breathtaking scale. She chronicles the rise of blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, and eventually, TikTok, and explains the horrific events surrounding Gamergate and the sudden demise of Vine. She tracks changes in creator habits across platforms and time. In some ways, this book is the official history of the profession of "content creation," which has generated wealth without gatekeepers for the first time in history. Readers will learn valuable lessons about the math and science behind what goes viral and are sure to be blown away when they see the dollar amounts moving through the industry. This socioeconomics docudrama is both fun and terrifying . . . just like the internet.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A technology journalist looks at the downside of the social media revolution. A former tech reporter for the New York Times, Lorenz is now a columnist for the Washington Post, and she has been accused of reporting errors. In her debut book, the author walks us through the rise of the major platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and recounts the eclipse of MySpace and Vine. She identifies "mommy bloggers" as the first group to become influencers and the first to see the potential for monetization of their social media presence. (Readers interested in a more in-depth discussion of this aspect of the online world should turn to Stephanie McNeal's Swipe Up for More!) The development of simple video editing tools switched the emphasis from written to visual material, and internet-enabled phones meant that social media became ubiquitous. The problem with this book is that Lorenz fails to offer enough novel analysis of the industry. There are already numerous books on influencers, YouTube, online celebrity marketing, and virtually every other aspect of the social media phenomenon. The author's theme is that while social media has changed the business and cultural landscape by giving power to creative individuals, it has also created a dangerous whirlpool of conflict, exploitation, and disinformation. True enough, but it's hardly a revolutionary insight. Is she unaware of the widespread view that has taken hold in the past few years that social media is a very mixed blessing? This points to the most surprising aspect of the book: It seems dated and dull. The author's online followers might like it, but other people will probably be unimpressed. Social media, writes Lorenz, "is often dismissed by traditionalists as a vacant fad, when in fact it is the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism." If only the text reflected the gravitas of that disruption. A capable piece of historical research that breaks little new ground. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1: The Blogging Revolution // CHAPTER 1 // The Blogging Revolution LET'S GO BACK TO THE year 2000. It was the year of the Y2K scare and the peak of the dot-com bubble. The web had been around since the early 1990s, long enough to spread euphoria and trepidation. The first browser had come out seven years earlier, but moving data over the internet was still arduous. Many ambitious companies hitched their cart to the proliferating internet, but their disruptive potential was qualified by many observers. Amazon, for example, was considered a threat to bookstores and music shops, but little else. Millions of people were starting to enjoy being online. They logged on through portals like AOL, using dial-up modems that moved at a crawl. But once online, they could instant message and email friends, join chat rooms, and shop. They could even read articles from the few newspapers experimenting with putting their content online. Heavily pixelated photos, Flash animation, and ASCII art were as glitzy as it got at the time. (On a 56K modem, it would have taken twelve hours to download a single TikTok video). As for online clout, Half-Life forum admin was the best you could hope for. That would all change, however, with the rise of the blog. The "web log" originated in the '90s, when a cadre of early internet users began creating their own websites to share their thoughts and favorite links with the world. The barrier to entry was relatively high, since launching a website in those days required buying a domain name and knowing how to code. That changed at the turn of the century, as blogging platforms like Blogger, Blogspot, and WordPress emerged. When it came to visual design, these platforms were unexciting. They offered cookie-cutter websites--usually text-only. But the bare-bones solution was sneakily revolutionary. Blogs could be set up in minutes. Suddenly, anyone with internet access could become a publisher. Media consumers became media producers. It's hard to remember how novel this was. Before the blog era, if you wanted to share your ideas with the public, you had to make it past layers upon layers of legacy gatekeepers. Letters to the editor, call-ins to the radio, article or book submissions--all had to be approved by a faceless authority at a moated institution. Even for those who'd been admitted through the tall gates of legacy media, publication opportunities only presented themselves after years of rising through the ranks, flattering the powerful, and simply lucking out. You could always go it alone and create your own underground zine or DIY publications, but your reach was limited as long as the gatekeepers gate-kept. Not so with blogs. You could say whatever you wanted, on any subject, in any style. For your entire life, you'd been an outsider. No longer. Predictably, some of the first notable blogs focused on technology, and while their impact might have been large within the tech world, they rarely made an impression outside of it. However, in the political world, a blog's influence could extend beyond a narrow group of industry insiders, as shown by one blog with the somewhat cumbersome name Talking Points Memo . Journalist Josh Marshall started Talking Points Memo days after the Bush-Gore election in 2000, when the result was still up in the air. He was covering politics for the bimonthly publication, the American Prospect . Marshall had some web-design chops, and he happened to have a vacation scheduled for the week after Election Day. As the Bush-Gore contest intensified, Marshall launched Talking Points Memo and posted commentary by the hour. Marshall aggregated important news items and interspersed them with insider tips he received from fellow journalists and campaign officials. He seemed to post at lightspeed compared to everyone else, plus he could offer more color and candor than legacy media could. Soon Washington insiders were refreshing the site faster than Marshall could update it. Talking Points Memo wasn't the first online site to cover politics by the minute. Years before Marshall launched his blog, a former CBS gift-shop manager by the name of Matt Drudge launched a political gossip newsletter called Drudge Report. While Drudge's website made a big splash--growing especially fast during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal--Drudge was not a blogger but an aggregator. Marshall was playing a different game, reporting original stories and commenting in his unique voice. Within months, he decided to take the radical step of quitting his job at the Prospect to blog full-time. Marshall got in at the right time, as he was among the first wave of bloggers who were attracting real audiences online. Talking Points Memo delved into the minutiae of policy debates and the Washington rumor mill. The writing was wonky and candid, not the view-from-nowhere type of writing that political news junkies were used to. That was the point. As Talking Points Memo and its ilk got off the ground, the blogosphere bloomed around them. The total number of blogs doubled every six months. In 2006, there were 60 million blogs in existence. Blogging platforms expanded the web to non-techies, and soon new blogs emerged on everything--from indie music to Hollywood classics, to fashion, gaming, parenting, and drug culture--along with thousands of personal blogs that functioned as online journals. Most legacy publications didn't see blogs as a threat at first. Bloggers looked like curious eccentrics, a band of second-rate scribblers with too much time on their hands. The old guard scoffed that bloggers' writing wasn't up to the standards of the New York Times or Vanity Fair. They doubted that bloggers could ever break consequential stories without the access and talent monopolized by legacy media. Readers, on the other hand, enjoyed the lack of polish. The media environment of the 1990s was centralized and corporate after waves of mergers left only a handful of conglomerates whose content was middle-of-the-road, burnished, and safe. In 2002, Wired declared "The Blogging Revolution," a paradigm shift in how people distributed and received information: "Readers increasingly doubt the authority of the Washington Post or National Review, despite their grand-sounding titles and large staffs. They know that behind the curtain are fallible writers and editors who are no more inherently trustworthy than a lone blogger who has earned a reader's respect." Blogs offered readers everything that legacy media couldn't, revealing what writers really thought. What's more, blogs also enabled real-time interaction between writers and readers through comments sections attached to posts. Unlike message boards, blog posts primed the discussion with original, substantial content that was ripe for debate. Soon little bubbles of taste, influence, and community formed, and they started to enter the mainstream. It was from a reader tip that Marshall learned of a December 2002 toast given by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott at the hundredth birthday tribute to longtime pro-segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond. In his remarks, Lott openly praised Thurmond's overtly racist 1948 presidential campaign. While the Washington Post and ABC News ran brief stories about Thurmond's birthday gathering, no outlet made particular note of Lott's remarks. After the reader's tip, however, Marshall ended up writing some twenty posts about Lott's speech and its aftermath. Marshall assembled a broad argument against Lott, citing similar remarks in Lott's past, establishing a pattern of praise for neo-Confederate causes and a refusal to condemn segregation. Soon, other bloggers, and then Washington media, took notice. Lott took to TV to try to repair his image, but his avoidance of apology only led to him being excoriated by both the left and the right. Within two weeks of Marshall's first blog post, Lott resigned from his leadership position in disgrace. Washington insiders realized that the story would have never taken off if not for Marshall and the blogosphere. A blogger had just sacked the Senate majority leader. On December 13, 2002, the New York Post ran the headline: "THE INTERNET'S FIRST SCALP." Throughout the 2000s, in every field they touched, blogs circumvented gatekeepers and tore down old structures. Launching a blog required next to no monetary investment, which made it a venture within reach to all. Here was the great advantage that promised to upend capitalism as it existed before the internet. With hard work and the cost of a few large pizzas, someone could take on a company with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. In 2002, a company called BlogAds launched to help blogs sell display ads on their sites. BlogAds was soon followed by Google's AdSense and other competitors, allowing top blogs to adopt an ad-driven business model similar to that used by print publications, but with vastly lower overhead and superior targeting capabilities. Marshall started using BlogAds in 2003, and by the following year he was making nearly $10,000 per month. A few years later, ad revenue had grown so much that he was able to hire a team of reporters--often from old-media outlets--growing his staff to about twenty-five by 2012. A decade in, Marshall was no longer a reporter or a blogger; he was running a full-fledged media company. So it was elsewhere: popular sites like Gawker and FiveThirtyEight started with just one or two people, but as audiences grew, they were able to scale up into full newsrooms. As bloggers proliferated, they didn't just adopt traditional beats; they shaped the cultures around the topics they wrote about. In 2005, Garrett Graff, who had helped run online outreach for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, became the first blogger to receive a White House press pass. That same year, Perez Hilton had Hollywood in knots, out-tabloiding the tabloids with his blog PageSixSixSix , which was later dubbed "Hollywood's Most-Hated Website." Music blogs like Pitchfork were defining an indie scene that the major labels scrambled to made sense of. Fashion blogs like the Sartorialist were identifying new looks before the glossy mags picked them up. Nightlife blogs like Hipster Runoff and photographer Mark Hunter's The Cobrasnake cultivated a new aesthetic for the era and launched internet "It" girls into mainstream celebrity culture. In 2021, W magazine wrote, "Hunter's unfiltered nightlife shots defined an early digital aesthetic--and ushered in the social media age." "My site was Instagram before there was Instagram," Hunter told me. It was the first time "regular" people were able to build their image off online party photos en masse. "There was this whole underbelly of nightlife getting documented and put out there," explained writer Lina Abascal, who documented the scene in her book Never Be Alone Again . "Sure, there were photographers at Studio 54, but there wasn't the internet... a whole night would be captured by people like Mark and uploaded online for people to go through." The model Cory Kennedy became a quintessential "Cobrasnake star." By 2009, fashion bloggers like Bryan Boy and Garance Dore made their foray into high-brow fashion circles. Bloggers were suddenly sitting in coveted front-row seats during New York Fashion Week, then at Dolce & Gabbana's show at Milan Fashion Week, in a shocking upset that fashion insiders dubbed "blogger gate." "Bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated," wrote Eric Wilson of the New York Times . As blogs boomed, traditional media felt the hurt, especially local and regional newspapers. Subscription rates everywhere plummeted now that the internet gave readers access to a wealth of free information, including articles from the very newspapers they no longer purchased in physical form. The industry's century-old business model crumbled, forcing newsrooms around the country to hemorrhage staff and shut down. As they did, gatekeepers went from dismissive to hostile. In testimony before Congress, David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and creator of The Wire , warned that the blogosphere was causing a media death spiral: "Readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin--namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host." By the end of the 2000s, it looked more like the parasite and host had merged. As top blogs expanded their headcount by hiring professional reporters, designers, and support staff, they came to resemble traditional media companies, complete with newsrooms and sales departments. Many legacy publishers realized that their best strategy was simply to invite bloggers in. Major publications, from the New York Times and the Atlantic to Glamour and Elle , hired the top crop of bloggers to fill out their ranks of writers and reporters. These same organizations also started major blogs of their own, or bought successful sites outright. By 2009, nearly half of the fifty most-trafficked blogs were owned by corporate media behemoths like CNN, ABC, and AOL. Yet while star bloggers in tech and politics received top billing, another class of bloggers was quietly ushering in a larger shift. In the end, the defining figure of the blog era wasn't the nerd or the wonk. It was the mommy blogger. Excerpted from Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.