Extremely Online

“Let's start with the title of your book, Extremely Online. Is it good or bad to be extremely online?”

“I mean, ultimately, like in some way, this, that the people who decide that they want to be extremely online, they, they end up being a product, their, their struggles end up being a product in some way of their decisions.”

“No, I mean, I think that like, there's, there's an, okay, so let's just go back to like one of like the first characters in your book. I mean, Julia Allison, that's, that's her name, right?”

“One of the things that's interesting is so many of the characters in your book fade in and out and that's because their personal form of entertainment or their mastery of a certain format, you know, eventually gets stale or goes away.”

“So let's, yes, let's get back to this degree question because, you know, we've danced around it a couple of times, but don't people have a choice about how online they actually want to be? Like you, it seems like everybody just goes all in all like there's a, um, here, there's a line from your epilogue that I found”

“Oh yes. Let me just say, let me say this, that doesn't end up driving people to feel like they need to be online all the time. They feel like they need to post everything that they need to be, you know, running after attention or they won't have a chance to be stable in this economy.”

“One of the things that I saw in your book that was really interesting to me was you diagnosed the fact that Buzzfeed became less relevant once algorithms were put into place into social media news feeds, because instead of needing a website to tell you what was good online, the platforms just did it themselves”

“And so I think, I mean, and I argue this in sort of the end of my book, but I think that we don't want to live in a less online or less connected world.”

“I mean, I talked to so many women in this book that just like, they have zero respect. And so people don't acknowledge the labor that comes along with this job because people think it's easy.”

“This is so, this is so like different than my actual life that it's just very easy to like emotionally separate. But of course I worry about like my attention span and, you know, I, again, I think the internet isn't inherently bad”

“So, um, I've always had a lot of attention on the internet and I've always had YouTubers making videos responding to me and I've read about people with millions of followers and I should, I should acknowledge like fame is literally in the title of my book.”

“And I was thinking of it recently just in regards to my own book. And I wish I could have spoken maybe more to like that. I talk about the negative effects on the content creators, but I think you're right.”