Taylor Lorenz on the Evolution of Being “Internet Famous”

In the beginning, there was us and there was them: Us, the regular people, and them, the famous. We watched them on screens, read about them in magazines, and fantasized about what it might be like for us—little old us!—to interact with them.

Early internet allowed us new ways to adore them. IMDB let us track their projects. Primitive message boards connected us with fellow fans. Geocities gave us the power to build fan sites, our own html-crafted altars. But as new social platforms sprang up over the past two decades, regular people discovered how they could wield the internet to not just connect with celebrity status—they could obtain it for themselves.

No one has charted the rise of this new type of fame like Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post tech columnist who pioneered the internet culture beat. Her new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, examines the evolution of how the internet democratized the landscape of fame. In the age of social media, just about anyone could turn their personality into a personal brand—and in the meantime, actual brands were forced to compete by projecting human traits onto corporate entities.

“Because our entire world is now mediated by the internet, online influence is one of the most powerful forms of currency,” Lorenz tells us. In this collection, she tracks how we got from the days of looking down on “oversharers” to influencers amassing enough power to take down the platform that made them—and other pivotal moments in social media history.