The assumed effects of growing up extremely online
Or how assumptions about everything lead to misunderstandings about everything else
For our latest episode last week we paused our mini-series focusing on Millennial sex and intimacy to look at the big picture. We had a great guide from this vantage point as Washington Post writer (and new author) Taylor Lorenz joined us to talk about her new book, Extremely Online.
We’ve both been reading, bookmarking, sharing and yes, actually presenting Taylor’s POV on culture, technology and trends for a decade. In this conversation, we reveal to Taylor that she’s a PowerPoint celebrity by virtue of being so widely cited by planners (she audibly gasped - didn’t anyone tell her?).
Together we discussed how the major media outlets looked at online culture at the beginning of the social web. Our conversation with Taylor focused on the basic misunderstandings journalists at that time had about the internet, and the audiences creating and consuming it. Naturally, we were interested in how journalists may have assigned assumed traits about early internet creators, influencers and consumers to Millennials.
Her insight as a journalist was as helpful as her own experience, in this regard. She has seen the ongoing dismissal of internet creators and also people in the Millennial age group, and now those considered part of Gen Z.
Taylor made one point which set off a future mini-series for us. Her career didn’t start in traditional newsrooms. Instead, she started in blogging and social content, which gave her a very unique set of skills for a future New York Times writer, and also a unique perspective. She points out that success for online media early in her career was based on clicks, but as she matured in her career, success for many of those same outlets has shifted back to subscriptions.
A light went on for both of us simultaneously. Though we had talked in the past about the allure of clickbait as a driver of the virulent “Millennials are killing x” headlines, we had not considered the impact to the overall narrative about Millennials that may have been caused by the shift from–and back to–subscriptions. Watch this space for an upcoming mini-series on this topic.
While we’re working on that, go ahead and pick up a copy of Extremely Online: The untold story of fame, influence and power on the internet by Taylor Lorenz.