Extremely Online

Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz (2023 Simon & Schuster eBook 384pp) 

Its always strange when events and eras you personally experienced become the subjects of history books. It all seemed so ‘hip & happening’ and on the bleeding edge at the time, now it’s a laundry list of names, dates and disasters. And so it is with this book – Extremely Online covers a period between the late 1990s and the late 2010s, from the dawn of Blogging to the rise of Tik Tok.

Taylor Lorenz is an impressive journalist who has covered events online since she herself was a blogger. She has written for many well-known publications both online and in print and frequently appears as a guest on radio, television and podcasts. I think the latter is where I first heard about this book and it intrigued me enough to have a read.

I have to take exception with her assertion early in the text where she states that having a website was beyond most people before the event of organised blogging – I was there in the 90s and there were thousands of personal sites to be found and many simple tools to create them with.

Beyond that, I found this book somewhat eye-opening. There were a lot of events, companies and personalities from the covered time-frame that I simply had no knowledge of. The origins of services like YouTube were often something completely at odds with what they grew to become.

Besides chronicling the rise and fall of companies and trends, Lorenz makes sure to focus on the human element. We are treated to some quite comprehensive biographical sketches of those who pioneered developments online. Often completely forgotten, they invented the ‘influencer’ economy and changed they way everyone sees the online world. An awful lot of these people tended to be female and/or minorities and few have been credited for their efforts, achievements and inventions. The so-called ‘Mummy-Bloggers’ who arguably kicked off the entire influencer and social media thing faced a massive backlash for their trouble. Several of the people in the book endured worse and some even took their own lives.

As the book goes on, the online world seems like a never-ending palimpsest where companies and trends rise up, become prominent before crashing and burning. Others soon appear in the wreckage and the cycle repeats. I was surprised how often this has played out and how each time parasitical management companies attach themselves to the latest trend only to ruin things for everyone.

If nothing else this book gives a clear and concise history of this online era and the ripples it spread out to the wider world. Lorenz is engaging and has clearly done her research along with actually living some of the story herself. The text can seem repetitive but that’s more the result of some of the same players in the story failing to learn their lessons and failing over and over again.

It seems there was a lot going on that I personally was oblivious to as I stuck to my own little corner of the net during those years. The wider picture this book gives is most welcome.