Steven Berlin Johnson
| Steven Johnson | |
|---|---|
 Steven Berlin Johnson at South by Southwest in 2008. |
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| Born | 6 June 1968 |
| Occupation | Author |
| Website | |
| Official website | |
Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author.
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[edit] Education
Steven Johnson attended the prestigious St. Albans School as a youth. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, [1][2] a part of Brown's modern culture and media department.[3] He also has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature.
[edit] Career
Johnson is the author of seven 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 Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Nerve.
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 (like television dramas and video games) have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills. His most recent book is entitled Where Good Ideas Come From and 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 the concept of the "adjacent possible" which enables the thinker to develop uncharted insights into unexplored areas.
[edit] "Where Good Ideas Come From"
This 2010 book (see bibliography below) adduces seven conditions that enable discoveries and inventions, each of which gets its own chapter:
1) The adjacent possible: The inventor must use the components that exist in his environment. Gutenberg used a wine press for his printing press. Engineers used analog vacuum tubes to make digital computers.
2) Liquid networks: Large cities, and now the Internet, make it possible for loose, informal networks to form, and these enable discoveries.
3) The slow hunch: It can take years for a hunch to blossom into a full-blown invention.
4) Serendipity: Some examples are mentioned: LSD, Teflon, Viagra, etc. Johnson argues that serendipity is not really under threat from Google, etc.
5) Error: This can also be a creative force. Lee de Forest's development of the audion diode and the triode was the result of erroneous thinking, and de Forest never understood how they worked. But the inventions changed the world.
6) Exaption: Birds developed feathers to keep warm and regulate their body temperature and later used them for flight. Vacuum tubes were developed for long-distance telephone networks and radio transmission and were later used for electronic computers. This story was repeated with transistors.
7) Platforms: It's unclear what this word refers to. He gives the example of the development of the Transit (satellite), a precursor of GPS by the Applied Physics Laboratory.
[edit] Awards and affiliations
Johnson’s book 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, and was runner up for the National Academies Communication award in 2006. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Johnson was the 2009 Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence at The Journalism School, Columbia University, and served for several years as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s Journalism School. He won a Newhouse School Mirror Award for his TIME magazine cover article titled "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live." He has appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Colbert Report, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
[edit] Personal life
Steven Johnson is married and has three sons. He lives with his family in Marin County, California.
[edit] Bibliography
Johnson has published the following books:
- Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (1997)
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2001)
- Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (2004)
- Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005)
- The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (2006)
- The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008)
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (2010) ISBN 978-1594487712
[edit] See also
- Googleshare
- “Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation” (Riverhead), Steven Johnson focuses on what he calls “the space of innovation.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/business/05shelf.html
[edit] References
- ^ Bio at edge.org
- ^ NY Times article
- ^ Modern Culture & Media, Brown University web page.
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Berlin Johnson |
- Official website
- Interview with Roy Christopher, December 2004
- Being There Interview July/August 2006
- TED Talks: Steven Johnson on the Web as a city at TED in 2003
- TED Talks: Steven Johnson tours the Ghost Map at TED Salon in 2006
- Consilience defeats miasma, Long Now talk audio, May 2007
- Steven Johnson TEDTalk: The Web and the city
