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.

Table of Contents

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 You Tube

Chapter 6: Creators Break Through

Part Ill: New Dynamics

Chapter 7: Twitter Follows Back

Chapter 8: Tumblr Famous

Chapter 9: lnstagram's Influence

Part IV: The Platform Battles for Creators

Chapter 1 0: 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 1 5: 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

Review

”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 columnist for The Washington Post’s business section covering online culture. Previously, she was a technology reporter for The New York Times business section, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Outside magazine, Fast Company, and more. She often appears on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is 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, calling her “The Bob Woodward of the TikTok generation.” She lives in Los Angeles, and you can follow her @TaylorLorenz on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.