This book is the story of social media, but rather than concentrating on the platforms themselves, it focuses on the most popular users. This struck me as a good idea: we wouldn’t, for example, try to tell the history of cinema without including the film stars who drew in audiences in the first place, so why are the star attractions often missing from the history of social media?

In Taylor’s own words,

Extremely Online offers a social history of social media.

Having read the book, it turns out that the problem is that social media stars just aren’t that interesting. Honestly, there is only so much I wanted to know about ‘Grumpy Cat’ and Lorenz vastly over-delivers. Even after Lorenz’s four-page explanation, I don’t understand the wider relevance of ‘Dramageddon’, an incident in which some YouTubers famed for make-up tutorials fell out with one another.

Lorenz’s research also often feels limited: it’s as though she buys into the hype a little too much. Grumpy Cat’s story also provides an excellent example of this flaw. Lorenz writes:

In 2016, she joined the cast of the Broadway musical Cats.

This left me wondering: how could a cat play a meaningful role in Cats? A few minutes of searching online reveals that this event was heavily promoted as such, talked up as a ‘Broadway debut’, but turned out to amount to being a ‘guest of honour’ at a single performance. That doesn’t amount to ‘joining the cast’ in any offline, reality-based view of the world, and it’s disappointing that Lorenz reported it in that way.

I enjoyed some sections and observations in Extremely Online. I hadn’t previously considered the argument that the lowering of production standards in television which necessarily accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic—chat shows filmed on Zoom from hosts’ homes, for example—helped online content with similarly low standards to become more mainstream.

I’m left with a better appreciation for the effort and professionalism of people who create social media content and the loyalty they come to command within their audience. Yet, I’d have preferred an analysis which considered the broader societal impact of this new form of celebrity rather than viewing it only on its own over-hyped terms.

Frankly, this book was not what I anticipated, and it failed to pique my interest as much as I had hoped. It might resonate with those deeply entrenched in social media culture, but I question its relevance to a wider audience.

One of the benefits of reading novels is the realisation of the degree to which any individual’s life experience is limited. We all get to live only one life and act out only one set of life choices.

In the last few days, though, it feels like the limits of my own experience have been fired at me from all angles.

On The Rest is Money, Steph McGovern and Robert Peston discussed the enormous industry of narrative video games, which eclipses television and movies combined. This is a world that has completely passed me by. I wouldn’t know Call of Duty if I fell over it. The last console I owned was a PlayStation 2. I think the last narrative computer game I played was Simon the Sorcerer on the Amiga, and I don’t think I ever completed that.

On Search Engine, Taylor Lorenz told PJ Vogt about hiring a ‘content consumer’ to watch all of her friends’ Instagram stories and send her a summary report each week, saving her the trouble. The bit that surprised me was Taylor and PJ’s shared concern about appearing to disengage at the end of the project, and how her friends might take this. I don’t think I even knew it was possible to see who had viewed Instagram stories, let alone that anyone would obsessively check that.

In medical news this week, there has been a bit of unnecessary fuss about doctors being advised to avoid ‘sexting’ and to avoid including their faces in explicit images. One consequence of spending more than twenty years with Wendy is that the modern dating world has passed us by. The idea that I would want to send or receive explicit photos with potential partners seems vaguely ridiculous and not erotic in the least.

We all lead sheltered lives; they’re just sheltered in different ways.