Taylor Lorenz: A Brief History of Being 'Extremely Online'

Welcome to the Reality Studies podcast! This podcast tries to clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Each episode, I sit down with leading thinkers for big idea dialogues about the research, concepts, and questions that animate their approaches to reality.

In this episode, I chat with Taylor Lorenz, Technology Columnist for The Washington Post and author of the forthcoming book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

Taylor's work hits one of the main goals I have in doing a podcast in the first place. I started Reality Studies because, over the past few years, I realized that a lot of us were asking variations of the same question: What happened to reality? And of course follow-ups of how and why did it get so weird? Are we living in a simulation?

So I started researching these questions and even if I wasn't going to be able to answer them I wanted deeper context for them. I've written about some of the fruits of this research in the newsletter, but the podcast is a place to spotlight the folks who are doing the critical work of identifying and translating cultural shifts. Taylor epitomizes this.

For years, she's been finding the niche corners of the internet and tech culture that the rest of mainstream media isn't taking seriously or outright dismissing. Her stories have documented how the commodification of attention has brought about new power structures, new economies, new creative ecosystems, new celebrities, and her book, Extremely Online, is out next week (Oct. 3).

With Extremely Online, Taylor looks back more than 20 years to the early aughts to the days when bloggers first began to reshape our understandings of media, all the way through the present moment, when TikTok has become a medium for activists and political speech. Like her reporting, the book sidesteps the conventional hero narratives of Silicon Valley giants, instead foregrounding the stories of platform users and lesser-known innovators whose contributions have had deep impacts on our lives—which are now, of course, extremely online.

About Taylor Lorenz:

Taylor is a technology columnist for The Washington Post's business section covering online culture and the content creator industry. She was previously a technology reporter for The New York Times business section, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Outside magazine, and more. She frequently appears on NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a former affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. More bio information can be found here.

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