Taylor Lorenz Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

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Taylor Lorenz
Taylor Lorenz was born in New York City and brought up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, attending Greenwich High School. She went to college at the University of Colorado Boulder before transferring to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she graduated with a degree in political science.

She has said that Tumblr (a social media site) caused her to become interested in internet culture.

From 2011 to 2014, she was social media editor for the Daily Mail, becoming its head of social media. Following a short stint of writing for The Daily Dot in 2014, she was a tech reporter for Business Insider from 2014 to 2017. For a short time in 2017, she wrote for The Hill’s blog section and got assaulted by a counter-protester as she was covering the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2017 and 2018 she was a tech reporter for The Daily Beast.

In 2019, she was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism where she studied how Gen Z interacts with the news on Instagram.

From 2019 until 2022, she worked as a tech reporter for The New York Times. She broke the story while at The Times that the Bloomberg 2020 presidential campaign was paying off Instagram meme accounts to post ads in the form of fake direct messages on the platform.

She is a tech columnist for The Washington Post’s business section where she covers the content creator industry and online culture. She was a tech reporter for The New York Times business section, The Daily Beast, and The Atlantic.

Taylor’s writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, BuzzFeed, Outside magazine, and more. She makes frequent appearances on CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC. She was a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow 2019 at Harvard University and is a former affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Taylor has appeared in documentaries on HBO, Netflix, and Hulu including HBO’s “Fake Famous”, Netflix’s “Eat the Rich: The Gamestop Saga”, and HBO’s “Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia”. In 2020, she helped adapt a feature that she wrote for The New York Times into a documentary that aired on Hulu and FX called “Who Gets to Be An Influencer”.

Taylor was named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list of leaders in Media and Entertainment in 2020. She was included in Adweek’s Young Influentials Who Are Shaping Media, Marketing, and Tech listing, and said that she contextualizes the internet as we are living it. She was named to Town & Country magazine’s New Creative Vanguards list of a rising generation of creatives, calling her The Bob Woodward of the TikTok generation in 2022. Taylor was named tech and media influencer of the year in 2023 by the World Influencers & Bloggers Association.

“Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2023. Presenting a groundbreaking social history of the internet, revealing how online influence and the creators that amass it have reshaped our world, both online and off.

Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture for over a decade, while documenting its far-reaching effects on every corner of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and it illuminates such deep truths about ourselves and the lives that we create online. She reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating entire new sectors of the economy. She illustrates this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive of changes in modern capitalism.

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

Emerging seemingly from nothing, these shifts in how we use the internet seem simple to just dismiss as fads. But these economic and social transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so insurgent and unappreciated that it ultimately created new to approaches to entertainment, work, fame, and ambition during the 21st century.

“Extremely Online” is the untold, inside story about what we’ve done to the internet, and what it’s done to us.

Taylor traces the influence and creation of internet celebrity from the start of the online age up to now and shows how online creators have been defining the dynamics of social media in real time.

The book reads like a vindication of the creator’s rights; showing how ordinary people circumvented traditional gatekeepers in order to create this new class of celebrity and how industries have needed to adapt to it. The book also reminds readers that the internet today wouldn’t be anything without the work of creators nonwhite, women, and queer.

Taylor delivers a well written and researched read with relevant and interesting subject matter. This is a must read for anybody that is interested in or uses social media or the internet. The book is a great mini-history on the early days of influencer culture and how it is that we got here to begin with. The first 60% is especially fantastic, with her early chapters about the rise of mommy bloggers and Julia Allison who were the blueprints for the modern creator economy being the best part of the book.

She meticulously pinpoints specific watershed moments and creators in internet history (some of which readers hadn’t even heard of) simultaneously tracing the tech industry and traditional media’s forays into, and the acceptance of the start of Twitter and how users shaped the social network in order to truly become the world’s town square. This is essential reading for anybody whose screen time is much higher than they would care to admit.