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. She instead boils the past two decades down to a “social history of social media,” the saga of how tech platforms, global audiences, and a new class of “creators” forged contemporary internet culture. Lorenz traces the rise of new forms of celebrity online over the course of the past quarter century in roughly historical sequence. She takes a reporter’s approach to cultural history, interviewing many of the most famous (or at least influential) users of various sites and apps. Along the way, she provides a thoroughgoing account of the modern internet, from the perspective of those who have, at one time or another, found ways to mine it for opportunities.
The resulting social changes wrought by and on these platforms constitute, in Lorenz’s words, a “revolution.” Communications technology ushered in “the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism” — demolishing “traditional barriers” and devastating “legacy institutions.” For Lorenz, the effects of this revolution were net positive, empowering the marginalized and providing more creative people with gainful employment.
Tapping her deep expertise in the subject, Lorenz makes a strong case that creators — not the tech platforms — truly shaped internet culture. “Online creators,” writes Lorenz, “don’t just produce content; they define the norms and dynamics of their medium.” In her retelling, tech executives never thought audiences would prefer user-generated content over “premium” content, but those who made it kept pushing the platforms forward and proving the bosses wrong. Apps that partnered with their most creative users prospered, most notably YouTube, while tech executives who fought their power-users, like those at Vine, watched their jobs evaporate.
From the vantage of 2023, the internet has obviously been an incredible social and cultural force — but does its history amount to a true revolution? 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. Thanks to a variety of monetization options, these tech platforms have “given more people the chance to benefit directly from their labor than at any other time in history.” Lorenz’s narrative lets us even dance on the grave of the dreaded “gatekeepers,” who can no longer prevent self-expressive teenagers from broadcasting to a potential audience of millions.
But what has humanity gained from the revolution Lorenz names and describes — besides new forms of monetization? “Extremely Online” spends little time on deep interpretations of online culture’s tentpole songs, videos and dances, or otherwise picking out the creative works that defined a generation. This is partly because most celebrations of web content have been half-ironic. Nothing is more exciting on the internet than quirky mediocrity: It was the odd baritone vocals and amateurish repetitive hook of Tay Zonday’s song “Chocolate Rain” that made anonymous 4chan users want to elevate it into an internet power-user anthem. In “Extremely Online,” likewise, earnest celebrations of creativity are rare, and usually exist to highlight times when the system failed to provide fame and fortune — as in the case of the uncredited copying of Black teen Jalaiah Harmon’s “Renegade” dance.
To be fair, pure creativity was never as important in social media as “authenticity.” The chance to see and hear people just like you propelled bloggers and vloggers over experienced establishment journalists engaging in the same topics. For a long time, Lorenz writes, this pursuit of authenticity at least provided a buttress against over-commercialization. Creators worried that their fans would reject open product placement. The last remnants of this ethos evaporated in 2017, ironically, when creators began to follow FTC guidance by being fully transparent about paid promotions on Instagram. Audiences responded by increasing their engagement; they may have wanted blatant shilling the whole time. The user demand for authorized marketing content became so integral to Instagram that third-rate influencers would buy their own luxury goods and post them with a #ad hashtag to pretend as if they, too, were part of the sponsored elite.
“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. But fans clearly adore creators’ marketing videos, sociopathic pranks, and observational comedy, or they would not watch them, buy up the creators’ merch, and attend live tours of creators where teens “stand in line for a selfie and see a dance performance comparable to a high school talent show.” One critical flaw in “Extremely Online” is that it offers little insight into the fans who worship the online creators: What makes these particular prankster vloggers and self-absorbed beauty influencers so appealing to the teenage mind?
Understanding why fans are drawn to certain creators might help us make sense of the larger question: whether anything has really changed. It’s clear that there has been an upheaval in teenage pop culture, but a true revolution would involve a major status reversal across society — where outsiders not only bypass gatekeepers but take over the establishment. YouTube and Instagram, in particular, have catalyzed the formation of a new creative class, one that recruits its members from outside the traditional union of liberal arts college graduates, art-school kids, pseudo-intellectuals and urban scenesters.
On the internet, fancy pedigrees and back-scratching networks matter much less than raw hustle. But are the creators parlaying their huge audience numbers into widespread social esteem 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.
In “Extremely Online,” Lorenz gives us a clear and compelling history of how the money came to flow into amateur-made short video content. But the book can’t quite prove that we’ve lived through a true revolution. Our celebrity aristocracy has never been stronger. The public looks to online creators for entertainment, but does not consider them important sources of art or glamour — much as our ravenous desire for Big Macs doesn’t translate into respect for the workers who make them. In popular parlance, being “extremely online” is a pejorative term for following too closely the latest junky memes and arcane creator gossip. Lorenz ably demonstrates how online creators fought to be paid for their passion, gumption and moxie, though her book leaves the reader questioning their social relevance: There is a growing, if exhausted, middle-class army of influencers and vloggers, but the professional creative industry remains best positioned to dominate our consciousness. At the end of the day, a cat video is only a cat video.
W. David Marx is author of “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change.” He lives in Tokyo.
The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet
Simon & Schuster. 373 pp. $29.99
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