Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet -- Taylor Lorenz, Hardcover

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. 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 inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.

Author: Taylor Lorenz
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 10/03/2023
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.17lbs
Size: 9.25h x 6.35w x 1.08d
ISBN: 9781982146863

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2023 pg. 30
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 08/21/2023
Booklist 09/15/2023 pg. 6

About the Author
Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist at The Washington Post covering online culture. Before joining The Washington Post, she was a technology reporter for The New York Times business section, at The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine, BuzzFeed, Harper's Bazaar, and more. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research focused on Instagram and news consumption. She is also a former affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Lorenz was named to Fortune's 40 Under 40 list of leaders in Media and Entertainment in 2020. Adweek included her in their Young Influentials Who Are Shaping Media, Marketing and Tech listing, stating that Lorenz "contextualizes the internet as we live it." In 2022, Town & Country magazine named her to their New Creative Vanguards list of a rising generation of creatives changing the way we think, see, and live, calling her "The Bob Woodward of the TikTok generation."