Taylor Lorenz (WH Allen)
SOCIAL media has changed our lives in many ways. It is now possible to keep in touch with close friends and family wherever they are on Earth, and to bridge divides that, in previous generations, would have seemed impossible to close. Social media is also where we engage with each other and learn about the world, making breaking news more urgent and immediate.
But the biggest impact of the past 20 years of technology is arguably neither of these, but the birth of the “creator”, an entirely new form of job. Part celebrity, part film producer and part hard-nosed businessperson, creators post on social platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, often in exchange for money. The creator economy is worth $250 billion, ; little wonder, then, one survey found .
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Buoyed by an audience of billions, platforms yearning for new content, and vast reserves of cash, the creator economy has grown prodigiously fast, as this first pass at documenting its history shows.
Taylor Lorenz is the leading journalist covering the creator economy, deciphering the fast-moving, emerging space for The Washington Post. In Extremely Online: The untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet, she tells of how the platforms that dominate our societies were set up, through the stories of the people on them. Most of these aren’t, despite her subtitle, untold, but are recontextualised from the churn of daily news reporting – which makes their inclusion in the book all the more important.
We hear how creators – who, in their short history, have previously been called cewebrities, influencers and a good number of other names besides – grew rich from their online fame and, in some instances, turned against the platforms that made them. Most notably, a group of young creators on Vine, a short-form video app that predated TikTok, practically held the platform to ransom, $1.2 million each for posting a handful of videos a week.
Lorenz also digs deeper into less-covered elements of the evolution of the creator industry, utilising her encyclopedic knowledge of the space. She convincingly weaves a narrative starting from mommy bloggers beginning to realise their worth in the early 2000s to the preened creator celebrities of today, who have better brand recognition among the younger generations than some Hollywood stars.
The book works on two fronts: for those well versed in the broad brushstrokes of the history of creators, Lorenz unearths nuggets of information not previously reported and draws links between totemic moments and lesser-known issues that led up to them. For those still trying to get to grips with the idea that their children willingly spend hours following an ultra-rich teenager who bombards them with nothing more than promotional plugs for products, Lorenz offers the chance to better understand what drives the creator economy.
Distilling 20 years of drama and the emergence of an entirely new industry into 300 pages was always going to be tricky. At times, you yearn for more colour to make the global shift in economy and culture more human – something Lorenz is strongest at when recounting the collapse of Vine, for which she had a near front-row view. But trying to write a first draft of history is never easy, and it is made even harder by dint of the fact that the internet moves quickly and book publishing moves slowly.
This book does a very capable job of overcoming both challenges and is vital reading for anyone trying to understand the world – both online and offline – in the present day.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a technology writer based in Newcastle, UK
