In her first book, The Washington Post’s technology and culture columnist offers an infectious celebration of internet youth culture.
Narrating those shifts and developments, however, presents a challenge. As Washington Post technology and culture columnist Taylor Lorenz notes early in her debut book, “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” a “complete history of the internet” would be an impossible, encyclopedic task.
From the vantage of 2023, the internet has obviously been an incredible social and cultural force — but does its history amount to a true? Teens today do spend an extraordinary amount of time watching videos on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram instead of television and cinema. And on Lorenz’s particular measure of “fame, influence, and power,” creators have risen in stature as a social group; the influencers are indeed influencing.
“Extremely Online” is infectious in celebrating the tsunami of creative youth culture, a wave that provided the world with an overabundance of homemade marketing videos for multinational brands, prank videos that verge on sociopathy and observational comedy for middle-school kids. Whenever someone complains about the dubious quality of this content stockpile, blame is quickly assigned to the platforms’ nefarious algorithms.
or A-list fame? The vast majority of Lorenz’s protagonists never managed that feat, for a list of reasons ranging from mediocrity to burnout, to, in some cases, “cancellation.” In the global status hierarchy, online creators have moved upward, but their ascent has so far stopped at the tier of reality TV and soap opera stars. The castle walls of the Hollywood-designer fashion system have never seemed higher.
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