Steven Johnson | |
|---|---|
 Johnson at South by Southwest in 2008. | |
| Born | June 6, 1968 |
| Occupation | Author |
| Website | Official website |
Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist.
Steven Johnson | |
|---|---|
Johnson at South by Southwest in 2008. | |
| Born | June 6, 1968 |
| Occupation | Author |
| Website | Official website |
Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist.
He attended St. Albans School and completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics,[1][2] a part of the school's modern culture and media department.[3] He also has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature.
Johnson is the author of eight books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. He has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in. A contributing editor to Wired, he writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and many other periodicals. Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Medium, Atavist, Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Patch.com.
He is the author of the best-selling book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts such as television dramas and video games have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills.
His book Where Good Ideas Come From advances the notion that innovative thinking is a slow and gradual process based on the concept of the "slow hunch" rather than an instant moment of inspiration. He expostulates on Stuart Kauffman's concept of the "adjacent possible" which enables the thinker to develop uncharted insights into unexplored areas.
His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age was released in September 2012.[4]
In August 2013, PBS announced that Johnson would be the host and co-creator of a new six-part series on the history of innovation, How We Got to Now, scheduled to air on PBS and BBC Two in Fall 2014.[5]
In 1997, Harvey Blume reviewed Johnson's first book, Interface Culture, and called it "a rewarding read -- stimulating, iconoclastic, and strikingly original."[6]
The A.V. Club said in a review of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, "It's a good argument made in great detail, mapped out with lists and charts of decision-affecting contingencies and intricate narrative structures. But how necessary it is remains debatable, especially once Everything Bad settles into simply restating its already convincing premise."[7]
David Quammen reviewed The Ghost Map (2006) for The New York Times, writing, "There's a great story here, one of the signal episodes in the history of medical science, and Johnson recounts it well... His book is a formidable gathering of small facts and big ideas, and the narrative portions are particularly strong, informed by real empathy for both his named and his nameless characters, flawed only sporadically by portentousness and small stylistic lapses." He calls the book, and Johnson, "intriguing" and "smart."[8]
Entertainment Weekly gave The Ghost Map an A rating, saying, "The Ghost Map asks the reader to imagine a situation in which 'you could leave town for a weekend and come back to find 10 percent of your neighbors being wheeled down the street in death carts.' For inhabitants of mid-19th-century London, cholera rendered this apocalyptic vision a terrifying reality... Johnson traces the courageous and ultimately successful attempt by an anesthetist/scientist/sleuth named John Snow to discover how the disease was transmitted. And he does so in a way that brings to nightmarish, thought-provoking life a world in which a swift but very unpleasant death can be just a glass of water away."[9]
Albert Berg called The Invention of Air (2008) "fascinating": "Reading this book, one comes to understand that the individuals we focus on in our historical texts are simply a small part of a much larger movement, shining examples of an entire world as it changes."[10]
Author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, in The Los Angeles Times, called 2010's Where Good Ideas Come From "a vision of innovation and ideas that is resolutely social, dynamic and material" and "fluidly written, entertaining and smart without being arcane"; Pang humorously summarizes it as "a Renaissance alchemical guide."[11] Bruce Ramsey described in The Seattle Times how, in Where Good Ideas Come From, "Johnson is looking for the new ideas in our civilization and seeking to explain why they arise where they do."[12]
Kirkus Reviews called Good Ideas a "robust volume that brings new perspective to an old subject" and said of Johnson, "Throughout, his infectious enthusiasm and unyielding insight inspire and entertain."[13] The Sunday Telegraph said, "Like all good ideas, this book is bigger than the sum of its parts... Johnson enlivens his argument with stories and examples that bring personality and depth to his ideas, and make for an engaging read..."[14]
Oliver Burkeman, in a review of Future Perfect, described the book as "a wide-ranging sketch of possibilities, not a detailed policy prescription, and read as such, it's frequently inspiring. Above all, it's exciting to reflect on the possibility that the many achievements of the Silicon Valley revolution might be compatible, rather than in tension, with a progressive focus on social justice and participatory democracy."[15]
Ethan Gilsdorf, also reviewing Future Perfect, called it "a buoyant and hopeful book" with "clear and engaging prose."[16]
Johnson's book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software was a finalist for the 2002 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.[17]
His Where Good Ideas Come From was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year's best books by The Economist. His book The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly,[18] and was runner up for the National Academies Communication Award in 2006. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
He was the 2009 Hearst new media professional-in-residence at Columbia Journalism School, and served for several years[when?] as a distinguished writer in residence at New York University's Journalism School. He won a Newhouse School Mirror Award for his 2009 TIME magazine cover article "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live." He has appeared on television programs such as The Colbert Report, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
In 2010, interviewer Oliver Burkeman wrote that "Johnson, who lives with his wife Alexa Robinson and their three sons in Brooklyn, has written seven well-received books and launched three notable web startups, including the pioneering web magazine Feed, gives around 50 lectures a year, and writes plenty of high-profile opinion columns, all of which he has accomplished by the not-exactly-ancient age of 42. (While we're on the topic, he also has an enormous 1.4 million followers on Twitter...)"[19]
Johnson talks about a near-death experience in his 2004 book Mind Wide Open: He and his wife lived in "an apartment in a renovated old warehouse on the far west edge of downtown Manhattan," a home which featured "a massive eight-foot-high window looking out over the Hudson River." They often stood at the window, enjoying the view; during a June afternoon, they watched "an especially severe storm" approaching. Within minutes, the storm smashed the window, which they were, fortunately and momentarily, not directly in front of during the crisis.[20]
He has written that he has some difficulty with visual encoding, "a trait that I seem to share with Aldous Huxley," whom Johnson quotes at greater length in Mind Wide Open than cited here: "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon..."[21]
| Title | Year | ISBN | Subject matter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate | 1997 | ISBN 978-0-06-251482-0 | |
| Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software | 2001 | ISBN 978-0-684-86875-2 | Emergence |
| Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life | 2004 | ISBN 978-0-7432-4165-6 | Cognitive neuroscience |
| Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter | 2005 | ISBN 978-1-57322-307-2 | Popular culture; Video games |
| The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World | 2006 | ISBN 978-1-59448-925-9 | 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak; John Snow |
| The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America | 2008 | ISBN 978-1-59448-852-8 | Joseph Priestley |
| Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation | 2010 | ISBN 978-1-59448-771-2 | Innovation |
| Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age | 2012 | ISBN 978-1-59448-820-7 | "Peer progressives" |
