Washington Post ace reporter Taylor Lorenz delves into social history of the internet- takes the lid off and reveals how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world online and off. Internet platforms like Facebook with over 2, 958m, YouTube 2,514m, WhatsApp 2m, Instagram 2, 000m, WeChat 1, 309m, TikTok 1,051m, Douyin 715m, Telegram 700m, Snapchat 635m, as Meta platforms owns four biggest social media platforms each over one billion active users. Internet invented by English computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-lee from London after graduating from Oxford University became a software engineer at CERN, advanced in to the work of two scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf who developed a communications model standardizing how data was transmitted in multiple networks. Arpanet adopted tis on Jan 1, 1983 and the modern internet was born.

Internet viral sensation is all about making a connection, touching people’s life, was created with “ news of the little boy spread through the internet and reached a wide audience and created a high level of enthusiastic interest.

In September 2012, a photo of blue-eyed cat with a scowling underbite began to be shared widely on the internet.

Million hits YouTube videos of Alan Robert known as the French Spiderman who has scaled some of the world’s tallest building including those in London, Malaysia and Dubai and get arrested by local police on his way down. George King, who free-climbed The Shard in London, took his hand again when he scaled one of Europe’s highest skyscrapers in Barcelona.

The power of online influence  sometimes bestowed by a flash of virality can be capitalized by those who seize the moment. Taylor Lorenz chronicles the history of social media, internet fame and alongside it, the explosive growth of “creator economy” that caters to it, estimated to be a market worth a quarter of  a trillion dollars annually.

Her  tale is an opportunity missed by tech overlords and Silicon Valley nerds deep in code. They claim to care for “ connecting the world” ignoring the curiosities and demands of their most creative users. Early 2000s came mommy bloggers who shook up discourse around motherhood with unfiltered debate on its harsher realities.

Then came young brash MySpacers, Viral Vloggers, and pet owners whose memes made their animals into overnight internet sensations.

For micro-influencers influencer management and marketing platforms offered ways to matchmake e-celebs with brands. For bigger stars talent agencies, and agents swooped in to ink deals.

YouTube early on clocked the power of these kind of users early as Facebook and Snapchat were lagging behind who realised their errors and raced to catch up.

Lorenz shines a light on YouTube “Prank Culture” – playing practical jokes for online hits, which sometime become increasingly dangerous.

Gossip channels about romances, feuds and dramas of other creators are called out for their cruelty. Lorenz reveals into the impact of this “tortuous rat race” on creators themselves.  She writes:”: No Television screen or entertainment  execs needed”.

In “Extreme Online” Lorenz show how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. This phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetise their personal brands online, how bored teens, who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the  traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. But these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame and ambition in the 21^st century.

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz, Simon & Schuster, $29,99, WH Allen £16.99, 384 pages.