Overview

Taylor Lorenz's (2023) Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet offers a powerful counternarrative of the social history of social media, focusing on the ground people—the users—who generate the success of social media platforms, as opposed to hegemonic Big Tech or Silicon Valley that, from Lorenz's perspective, are oftentimes wrong in predicting the success of their platforms. Providing an in-depth glossary of prevalent social media events that aims to fill the gaps in our disoriented and hazy recollection of such events, Lorenz's focus is on the common user on social media, as "the real transformation has occurred closer to the ground" (p. 1). Because "suddenly anyone with internet access could become a publisher" has become a staple of social media from the early 2000s to present day, ordinary people can bypass gatekeepers found within traditional media and become creators (p. 12).

Lorenz's intended audience is also the very subject of her entire book—the common user of the internet. Reaching and connecting to a wider audience, Lorenz's writing is quite pleasing to read and comprehensible to a layperson audience. We can see Lorenz's clear target audience in her warnings and call to action against Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Providing this text as a glossary of the huge successes and irreparable mistakes within social media history, Lorenz calls upon us, the users, to learn from these episodes while Big Tech is stuck in its problematic ways, claiming, "While Big Tech has consolidated power, often against the individual, preying on your privacy, content, and attention, we should heed the lessons of the first twenty years of online life, and reflect those learnings in our work to build a better internet" (p. 291). By heavily emphasizing that we should "recognize the power [we] hold," Lorenz aims to empower the common user, including the marginalized and the users at the fringes of society, to show the central role and moral obligation we have in creating a more equitable online space (p. 289).

Although Lorenz is not a digital rhetorician or writing to an academic audience, she is nevertheless a prominent journalist who investigates areas of interest to academics located in rhetoric and the digital humanities. Through her extensive social history of big social media events in Extremely Online, Lorenz methodically outlines the social and technological forces within the digital ecosystem that shape creator and audience interactions mediated by social media platforms. Her book is relevant to the study of digital rhetoric and technology, as it centrally underscores how platforms mediate and manage discourse and thereby influence digital rhetorical practices. She vividly illustrates how social media has increased the speed and efficiency of online user-to-user interactions, aligning with John R. Gallagher's (2020) update culture. Gallagher (2020) defined update culture as "the speed, frequency, scale, and accessibility of circulating discourse" mediated by interactive and participatory internet (IPI) templates, which create this "ongoing need to reread, edit, and update texts" (p. 6). This is a useful framework to help situate the narration of social media episodes within a larger digital context that takes into account the more invisible politics of platform management.