Extremely Online

The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

By: Taylor Lorenz, Taylor Lorenz - introduction

Narrated by: Emily Tremaine

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.

Read so fast!

So interesting and well written, I flew through this book and highly recommend! Learned a lot!

A pop culture history of the internet

I have recommended this book to everyone I have met. Well researched and structured, Lorenz lays out the history of the internet (that we care about)

T Lorenz does it again

As a member of the “extremely online” I have to vouch for the thoroughness and care with which Taylor has chronicled these events. If you think you’re among the MOST in the know this book will still teach you more than you will imagine.

Highly recommend.

Chronicles the history and trends related to how people have engaged socially on the internet.

Intermixes business, technology, marketing, and regulation to create a compelling story.

Great read on the evolution of social media

This book is for you if want to learn and know how social media has redefined and shaped our lives from an analog to an always-on digital world. Insightful and well documented, the author knows her subject and how to package it in an accessible and relatable way for a non-tech person. Highly recommend.