Johnson, Steven 1968-

PERSONAL:

Born 1968; married; children: three sons. Education: Attended Brown University and Columbia University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. E-mail—sbj6668@earthlink.net.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, educator, cultural critic, and computer expert. Feed (online magazine), founder and editor-in-chief; contributing editor, Wired; monthly columnist, Discover; New York University, New York, NY, Distinguished Writer-in-Residence; lecturer to corporate and educational institutions.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, HarperEdge (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Scribner (New York, NY), 2001.

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Scribner (New York, NY), 2004.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2005, with a new afterword by the author, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2006.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Riverhead Hardcover, 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including the Guardian (London, England), Lingua Franca, Harper's, Brill's Content, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

Steven Johnson is a writer, media expert, and science maven whose books confront the complexities of the zones where science and culture meet. "Johnson is a master of making associations, of connecting the homely to the abstract," wrote Lenora Todaro in the Voice Literary Supplement, calling Johnson "a cultural critic with a poet's heart." In 1995, Johnson founded the now defunct online journal Feed, which examined the front lines of Web life and the development of computers and interconnectivity as a normal part of everyday existence.

In Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate Johnson explores in-depth how digital information technology, particularly the Internet, interacts with and changes the commonplace acts of communication. As much as prior innovations such as the printing press and television, computer-based means of interacting with the world are creating fundamental changes in the most basic cultural interactions. "Interface Culture is one of the first books to analytically critique and explore the forces unleashed by this new media and their broad cultural consequences," wrote Deborah A. Salazar in the Journal of Cultural Geography.

The "information space" where general users spend time "creating and exploring environments that reflect cultural values and aesthetics,"—particularly the online world—is influenced not only by cultural preferences but by the tools and interfaces used to explore that world, Salazar wrote. Johnson's theory is that Web browsers, computer desktops, online chat rooms, hyperlinks, Windows, Web sites, search engines—all of these interfaces between humans and technology serve to help users understand and utilize the technical advances going on around them, much the same way that novels helped readers in Victorian times make sense of their own society and surroundings. The design of the interface itself affects what type of information is available, how that information is retrieved, and what kind of material cannot be retrieved through that particular interface. "The interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between the two parties, making one sensible to the other," Johnson maintains.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked that readers familiar with Feed might be "disappointed" by Johnson's "engaging but superficial analysis of the way personal computers are changing our lives." However, Salazar found Interface Culture to be "an excellent introduction to a culturally based critique of what is happening in information space both from a design perspective, but more fundamentally, from a human cultural orientation as well." Harvey Blume, writing in the American Prospect, called the book "probably the single most memorable volume to come out of the Internet explosion of the 1990s. It was an intellectually bold, often exhilarating read, full of unexpected perspectives on culture and digital media."

Johnson's 2001 book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, expands on arguments in Interface Culture and ties them into the concept of emergence. Johnson defines emergence as "the movement from low-level rules to high-level sophistication." Emergent systems do not derive their organization and structure from a king, manager, dictator, or any type of centralized authority. Instead, the emergent system organizes itself, independent of any overall knowledge of the whole, into a fully functioning unit made up of the individual actions of its components. These individual actions naturally contribute to the function and well-being of the entire system without being directed by any sort of centralized manager or system of laws. The complex behavior of an entire emergent system is brought about by the simple, seemingly insignificant actions of the individuals in the system. "This delightful book introduces readers to the subject of complex adaptive systems (such as ant colonies), and discusses how large-scale order emerges from a series of small-scale interactions," wrote Peter Merholz in New Architect.

The prime example of an emergent system in Johnson's book is that of an ant colony. Individually, a single ant may forage for food, build tunnels, or defend the colony. These actions are driven by instinct, and can be altered by chemical signals from other members of the colony; a forager can stop looking for food and take up another activity if the communication it receives from other individuals indicates that food is plentiful and other work is necessary. This type of message, however, does not come down as orders from the colony's queen; instead, the message to adapt behavior comes from other individual components of the system. The emergent system of the ant colony regulates itself, changing almost immediately to adapt to different conditions. No command from a monarch is necessary; the system polices itself, and the individual components alter their behavior to best benefit the society as a whole.

Johnson also provides other examples of emergent systems. Under conditions of abundant food, slime mold cells swarm and move about, consuming vegetation; but when conditions worsen, the cells disband into individual units. Slashdot, a popular online community, is not governed by an editor or moderator, but is instead controlled by the participants who constantly review content, assign it ratings, and encourage the proliferation of content that meets overall approval while discouraging objectionable material. Programmer Danny Hillis created a "genetic algorithm" that evolved thousands of individual data-sorting programs into a single functional and efficient sorting program—one that Hillis himself could not understand.

Even cities can display emergent behavior in development of business districts, suburbs, slums, and population centers. "Cities seem to have emergent lives of their own, governed by the usually unwitting actions of their inhabitants over many generations," wrote Chris Lavers in the Guardian. "We are the ants, in other words, and cities are our colonies."

A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked that the "wide scope of the book may leave some readers wanting greater detail, but it does an excellent job of putting the Web into historical and biological context, with no dot-com diminishment." Lavers called Emergence "a fascinating book, full of surprises and insights, and written in an easy, engaging style." Johnson's notions are "intelligent, witty, and tremendously thought-provoking," Lavers remarked. In Emergence, Blume observed, "Johnson has put some powerful ideas through a literary feedback loop that will, in all likelihood, accelerate and magnify their effect on our culture."

For Johnson's third book, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, he turns his attentions to matters of the mind. Johnson subjected himself to a series of tests ranging from brain imaging techniques to neurochemical analysis to get at the heart of the mind-brain connection. "Johnson is an engaging and intelligent guide," remarked Discover contributor Robert Wilson. "One follows him eagerly when he explores the neurophysiology of laughter or allows himself to be inserted into a magnetic resonance imaging machine," Wilson continued. Through his various self-experiments, Johnson formed conclusions on how the brain influences how we think, feel, and act. "Johnson weaves disparate strands of brain research and theory smoothly into the narrative," observed a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. "Only a concluding section on Freud's modern legacy feels like a tangent," added the reviewer. Top Producer's John Phipps pointed out that "while the working of the mind is not simple or easily described, Johnson's accounts of current research do offer realistic ideas that may well be confirmed by later, more rigorous studies." "Johnson very capably reduces the hard science of mind research into readable and even usable tools for all of us," concluded Phipps.

Johnson's fourth book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, delivers his controversial contrarian standpoint that video games, television, and the Internet are actually making us smarter. David Eaves in his review of the book on eaves.ca pointed out that "Johnson is not applauding or even condoning the content of pop culture, what he is celebrating is how the increasing complexity of TV shows, video games and internet content is forcing us to work harder to explore, understand, engage and even guide, the content." Johnson uses the collective rise in IQ points (at three points per decade) over the past thirty years as proof that Americans are getting smarter, and connects it to the advent of more sophisticated television shows and video games. "But how direct is this link, if it exists at all? And how would someone whose cultural diet has not changed at all over the same period measure up? Without a control group to make such comparisons, Johnson wisely turns his focus to various cultural genres and the specific skills they inspire," maintained San Francisco Chronicle's Peter Hyman. "When he compares contemporary hit crime dramas like The Sopranos and 24—with their elaborate, multilevel plotlines, teeming casts of characters and open-ended narrative structures—with popular numbskull clunkers of yore like Starsky and Hutch … it's almost impossible not to agree with him that television drama has grown up and perhaps even achieved a kind of brilliance that probably rubs off on its viewers," observed New York Times' reviewer Walter Kirn. Johnson, however, does "see risks, for example, if children watch too much television or play too many video games. And some cultural works ‘are more rewarding than others,’ he writes, acknowledging that good literature ought to command people's attention, too," stated Boston Globe reviewer Joseph Rosenbloom.

Johnson's 2006 study, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, deals with the cholera epidemic in London's Soho district in 1854 that killed nearly seven hundred people in two weeks, one of the worst cholera outbreaks in London's history. In this book, "Johnson adds a new and welcome element—old-fashioned storytelling flair, another form of street knowledge—to his fractal, multi-faceted method of unraveling the scientific mysteries of everyday life," commended Los Angeles Times contributor Mark Coleman. Conventional wisdom of the period regarded miasma (smelly air in dirty spaces) as the culprit for the outbreak. However, physician John Snow believed that cholera was spread through water, no thanks to London's horrifically unsanitary methods of dealing with waste. Along with clergyman Henry Whitehead (who initially set out to prove Snow wrong), Snow was able to successfully back up his theory. His map (referred to as a "ghost map"), depicting where people died in relation to their water source finally convinced city leaders to take action. Kevin Crowley, reviewer for inthenews.co.uk, believed that Johnson's "narration of the intertwining tales of Snow and Whitehead is undermined by explaining their findings within the first 50 pages thus quashing any sense of tension." The book does more than tell their story though, "Johnson shows the reader a vast, interconnected picture about urban and bacterial life: how information and illness spreads, how ideas and sewage flow; in short, the whole ecosystem of what a city ‘means,’" concluded Stuart Kelly, reviewer for Scotland on Sunday. "The Ghost Map is not just a remarkable story, but a remarkable study in what we might learn from that story," added Kelley.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Prospect, November 19, 2001, Harvey Blume, review of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, pp. 42-45.

American Scholar, autumn, 2001, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, review of Emergence, pp. 138-142.

Booklist, July, 2001, review of Emergence, p. 1953.

Boston Globe, May 1, 2005, Joseph Rosenbloom, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

Discover, July 1, 2004, Robert Wilson, review of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, p. 82.

Economist, October 27, 2001, review of Emergence.

Guardian (London, England), November 24, 2001, review of Emergence, p. 10; August 24, 2002, review of Emergence, p. 25.

Humanities, November/December, 2006, Bruce Cole, "A Conversation with Steven Johnson," interview.

Independent (London, England), October 9, 2001, Roz Kaveny, review of Emergence, p. 5.

Journal of Cultural Geography, fall-winter, 2001, Deborah A. Salazar, review of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, pp. 140-142.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2003, review of Mind Wide Open, p. 1393.

Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2006, Mark Coleman, review of The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.

New Architect, March, 2002, Peter Merholz, review of Emergence, p. 56.

New Statesman, April 26, 2004, Bryan Appleyard, review of Mind Wide Open, p. 53.

New York Times, December 9, 2001, Steven Johnson, "Populist Editing," p. 90; April 6, 2002, Steven Johnson, "Games People Play on Computers," p. A15; May 22, 2005, Walter Kirn, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You; May 26, 2005, Janet Maslin, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), November 4, 2001, Dan Tranberg, "Straightforward Writing Makes the Complex Simple; An Easy Look at the Concept of Emergence," p. 112.

Publishers Weekly, October 27, 1997, review of Interface Culture, p. 60; July 23, 2001, review of Emergence, p. 61; December 1, 2003, review of Mind Wide Open, p. 50.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2005, Peter Hyman, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You, p. F3.

School Library Journal, October 1, 2005, Catherine Gilbride, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You, p. 201.

Scotland on Sunday, November 19, 2006, Stuart Kelly, review of The Ghost Map.

Spectator, December 29, 2001, Hugh Lawson-Tancred, review of Emergence, p. 38.

Time, May 9, 2005, James Poniewozik, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You, p. 67.

Time International, December 18, 2006, Michael Brunton, review of The Ghost Map, p. 6.

Top Producer, December 4, 2005, John Phipps, review of Mind Wide Open.

Voice Literary Supplement, June, 2000, Lenora Todaro, "Writers on the Verge."

WorldLink, January-February, 2002, Lance Knobel, review of Emergence, pp. 186-187.

ONLINE

Ape Culture,http://www.apeculture.com/ (February 6, 2006) Mary E. Ladd, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Atlantic Unbound,http://www.theatlantic.com/ (September 17, 2002), Harvey Blume, interview with Johnson.

Bookslut,http://www.bookslut.com/ (June, 2005), Liz Miller, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You.

eaves.ca,http://eaves.ca/ (February 27, 2007) David Eaves, review of Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Frontline Web site,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ (January 24, 2002), Wen Stephenson, "Beyond the Bubble," interview with Johnson.

inthenews.co.uk,http://www.inthenews.co.uk/ (December 12, 2006), review of The Ghost Map.

O'Reilly Network Web site,http://www.oreillynet.com/ (September 17, 2002), David Sims and Rael Dornfest, interview with Johnson.

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (September 17, 2002) Scott Rosenberg, review of Interface Culture.

Stating the Obvious,http://www.theobvious.com/ (January 21, 1998), Michael Sippey, "Just One Question for Steven Johnson" (interview).

Steven Johnson Home Page,http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com (June 5, 2007).