A new kind of celebrity emerges from social media platforms that rivals legacy media— just as TV did to radio before it. Like other big platform shifts, it’s overlooked because young people lead the attention.
That’s from the 2023 book from my friend and prominent tech journalist Taylor Lorenz called “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.”
As she writes: “Tech founders may control the source code, but users shape the product.”
I read the book as a people’s history of early creator culture. It tracks one of the subtler but more important transitions of the recent web: From social networking between people who know each other from real life, to social media, in which people fully define as creators on platforms to fans.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz