Blair's Reviews > Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet

Abandoned at 33%. This isn’t a general history of social media, and it’s my own fault that I thought otherwise, because the real subject matter is right there in the subtitle: fame, influence and power. Lorenz is concerned with two things: firstly, how the now-ubiquitous figure of the influencer (or, ugh, ‘content creator’) came to exist; and secondly, how influencers started making big money. It is, at its heart, a book about money, much more than it is a book about the internet.

In the chapter on MySpace and Facebook, Lorenz briefly writes about a ‘scene kid’, Kiki Kannibal, whose online popularity brought with it an onslaught of bullying. As I did with a lot of the figures in this book who were unknown to me, I googled the girl’s name to see what she’s doing now. This led me to a Rolling Stone article that fills in the details: Kiki was harassed relentlessly, threatened, doxxed, and targeted by a paedophile. It got so bad her parents had to abandon their house, which they then couldn’t sell, and ended up bankrupt. The article ends with the whole family crammed into Kiki’s grandmother’s house, broke, jittery, chafing against each other. It’s an incredibly bleak story. It’s also a hundred times more fascinating than anything in this book.

This encapsulates my problem with Extremely Online: the interesting human stories are buried under a load of boring generalised detail. An oral history might have been a better way to tell it. A book about influencers who never actually made it could also be great. This book, as it is, is not for me.

(It’s also so US-centric that Lorenz refers to a clip from The Day Today simply as ‘an early viral video’, as if it originated on YouTube. Which was, honestly, the point at which I thought yep, I’m probably not going to finish reading this.)