Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 435

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet," by Taylor Lorenz.

 

When looking at what the internet has wrought in the last twenty years, we tend to focus on Big Tech: the massive corporations, the founders behind them, their visionary innovations, and the power they wield. But that’s only half of the story. For all the platforms that Silicon Valley has created and algorithms they’ve tested, the real transformation has occurred closer to the ground. The business of Big Tech doesn’t hinge on what they’ve invented but on what they’ve channeled. From the first amateur blog to the newest TikTok sensation, it has been users and those in their periphery who’ve brought the creative energy, the tech companies rising around them, fueled by the rich content and collective attention. It’s users who revolutionized entirely new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the twenty-first century.

Reading blog posts from that era today, it’s shocking how mundane much of it was. Venting about a bad mealtime or stressful playdate was revelatory, but now, over a decade later, the chatty, swear-laden, unfiltered style seems completely normal—because mommy bloggers were the first to bring that honesty to the public sphere.

“There’s a particular kind of fame that’s very normal now,” [Julia] Allison told me. “But no one was prepared in that era. They used to call it micro fame, and it’s this experience of blowing up when you don’t expect to. You’re not blowing up the way Taylor Swift blew up. Instead, you get a lot of attention and become a big celebrity—but only in a select niche. It creates a bizarre juxtaposition of being both super famous and unknown, all at once. The way people got well-known online, on the internet, was very new to everyone, including me.”

That same year, the video app pack was joined by another one: Musical.ly, the app that eventually became TikTok. 

Originally founded as an educational platform called Cicada, Musical.ly was meant to offer students three-to-five-minute videos on various subjects. After burning $250,000 only to learn that the app’s target demographic resisted anything that smacked of school, founders Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang pivoted. Zhu had been impressed by the video revolution that Vine had launched. One day, on a train ride through Mountain View, he had a moment of inspiration. 

As Zhu observed a group of kids on the train, he noticed that half of the group was listening to music, while the other half was snapping and sharing selfies on social media. What if, Zhu thought, you could combine the two?

What traditional Hollywood (which almost uniformly continued to think of TikTok as a teen dance app) still didn’t realize is that social media is itself a 24/7 reality show, delivered to young people in a format they’re far more interested in consuming than traditional TV. With TikTok, the reality show culture of the aughts and traditional fame had finally merged. Young viewers weren’t interested in ham-handed storylines about their favorite influencers delivered on a streaming service six months later. They could watch it all play out in real time on the internet, for free.