Extremely Online - by Taylor Lorenz

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Terrific . . . Extremely Online aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos.... [Lorenz] is a knowledgeable, opinionated guide to the ways internet fame has become fame, full stop."
--Clay Shirky, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Valuable and entertaining... The book is an enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers."
--ASSOCIATED PRESS

"Each story Lorenz spotlights is carefully chosen to highlight the power that users have historically held in shaping social media trends and culture."
--TEEN VOGUE

"If you want to understand what is happening on the internet, you start by reading Taylor Lorenz."
--BLOOMBERG

"Tapping her deep expertise in the subject, Lorenz makes a strong case that creators--not the tech platforms--truly shaped internet culture."
--WASHINGTON POST

"Fascinating, eye-opening, and unbelievable in equal parts, Extremely Online is a comprehensive witness account of the players, operatives, and principals driving content on the internet today, across platforms and even across entire industries. A must-read for anyone wishing to understand the most arcane conspiracy theories taking up the nation's consciousness to the sweeping cultural changes a rising generation has brought about."
--TOWN & COUNTRY

"More than just a history lesson, Lorenz's well-researched book does a better job of connecting the dots than almost anything else I've read on the subject of social media's meteoric growth, and the unexpected rise of the influencer."
--TECH RADAR

"Readers will learn valuable lessons about...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."
--BOOKLIST

"This astute debut from Lorenz, a Washington Post technology columnist, traces the tumultuous history of social media from the early 2000s to the present.... 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.... It's a powerful assessment of how logging on has changed the world."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

About the Author

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more. She is the founder of User Magazine, an independent media company covering tech and online culture and host of Power User podcast on Vox Media. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Outside magazine, and others. She frequently appears on the BBC, NBC, CNN, CBS, and more. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Fortune named her "40 Under 40" in 2020, and Town & Country called her "The Bob Woodward of the TikTok generation" in its "New Creative Vanguard" list.