Steven Johnson (author)

Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist .

Education

Johnson Grew up in Washington, DC , ^[2] where he attended St. Albans School . He COMPLETED his undergraduate degree at Brown University , where he studied Semiotiek , ^{[3] [4]} a part of the school’s modern culture and media department. ^[5] He’ll be has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature.

Career

Johnson is the author of nine books, largely on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience. He has’ll be co-created three Influential Web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED , the Webby Award -winning community site, Plastic.com en 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 ook Serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, zoals Medium, Atavist, Meetup.com , Beta Works, 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), welke argues dat over the last three decades popular culture artifacts zoals television dramas and video games harbor Become getting more complex and port helped to foster hogere-order thinking skills.

His book Where Good Ideas Come From advances a notion to challenge the popular story of a genius wages are experiencing an instantaneous moment of inspiration. Johnson Limit download argues dat innovative thinking is a slow, Gradual, and very networked process in welke “slow hunches” are cultivated, and COMPLETED, by exposure to seemingly unrelated ideas and quandaries from other disciplines and thinkers. He lists have the themes has those given from Studying welke environments and conditions port leg correlated, Historically, with high innovation. He argues dat ze make theoretical sense Because hun tendens to effectief explore the “Adjacent possible” Stuart Kauffman ‘s concept (welke Johnson cites) or the space or innovations waiting to be made from combining redacteuren-available notions and solutions.

His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age was released in September 2012. ^[6]

In August 2013, PBS announced dat Johnson mention anything 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 Fall 2014. ^[7]

Reception

Critical reception

In 1997, Harvey Blume reviewed Johnson’s first book, Interface Culture , and called it “a rewarding read – stimulating, iconoclastic, and strikingly original.” ^[8]

The AV Club zegt 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 or decision-affecting contingencies and intricate narrative structures . But how it is Necessary scope for debate loveable, met name once Everything Bad settles JSON simply restating zijn Already convincing premise. ” ^[9]

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 bijzonder strong, informed by real empathy for zowel his named and his nameless characters, flawed only sporadically at portentousness and small STYLISTIC lapses. ” He called the book, and Johnson, “intriguing” and “smart.” ^[10]

Entertainment Weekly Watch The Ghost Map an ‘A’ rating, saying, “ The Ghost Map Asks the reader to imagine a situation in welke ‘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 reality … Terrifying Johnson traces the courageous and ultimately successful attempt at an anesthetist / scientist / sleuth named John Snow to discover how the disease was Transmitted. And he does so in a way dat Brings to nightmarish, thought-provoking life a world in welke a swift but very unpleasant death kan be just a glass of water away. ” ^[11]

Author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, in The Los Angeles Times , called 2010s Where Good Ideas Come From “a vision of innovation and ideas therein are resolutely social, dynamic and material” and “fluidly written, entertaining and smart without being arcane,” – – “a Renaissance alchemical guide.” ^[12] 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.” ^[13]

Kirkus Reviews called Good Ideas a “robust volume therein Brings new perspective to an old subject” and zegt or Johnson, “Throughout, his infectious Enthusiasm and unyielding insight inspiring and entertaining.” ^[14] The Sunday Telegraph zegt, “Like all good ideas, this book is bigger dan de sum or zijn parts … Johnson enlivens his argument with stories and examples therein brings personality and depth to his ideas, and make for an Engaging read … “ ^[15]

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 industry leaders, it’s Frequently inspiring. Above all, it’s exciting to reflect on the Possibility dat de many achievements of the Silicon Valley revolution Might Be compatible, Rather dan in tension, with a progressive focus on social justice and participatory democracy. ” ^[16]

Ethan Gilsdorf framing Reviewing Future Perfect , called it “a buoyant and Hopeful book” with “clear and Engaging prose.” ^[17]

Awards and receptacles

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 . ^[18]

His Where Good Ideas Come From was a finalist for the award for best 800CEORead 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 best in Nonfiction books of 2006 volgens to Entertainment Weekly , ^[19] and was runner up for the National Academies Communication Award in 2006. His books port leg translated JSON morethan a carton languages.

He was the 2009 Hearst new media professionals-in-residence at Columbia Journalism School , and served for years verschillende ^{[ als? ]} 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 zoals The Colbert Report , The Charlie Rose Show , The Daily Show with Jon Stewart , and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer .

Personal life

After growing up in Washington, DC , Johnson moved to New York City in 1990 and spent twenty-one years there, living in Morningside Heights, Manhattan for seven years, dan the West Village , where his first sun was born. ^[2]Johnson writes dat, on September 11, 2001, he and his wife “watched the Twin Towers fall from Greenwich Street on our sun’s first day home from the hospital. When our second sun was on the way, we decamped for Brooklyn. .. ” ^[2]

In 2010, interviewer Oliver Burkeman wrote that ‘Johnson, who lives with his wife Alexa Robinson en hun three sons Brooklyn … Gives around 50 lectures a year, and writes plenty of high-profile opinion columns, all or welke he has accomplished by the not-Exactly-ancient age of 42. (While we’re on the topic, he’ll be has an enormous 1.4 million followers on Twitter …) ” ^[20]

In a 2011 blog, he wrote dat he and his family mention anything be leaving New York “for a few years” as they ‘mention anything be “moving to Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge across the bay from San Francisco” – “a two-year move: an adventure, not a life-changer.” ^[2]

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 western edge of downtown Manhattan,” a home with “a massive eight-foot-high window looking out over the Hudson River” where they ‘of or in Enjoyed the view. On a June afternoon, they ‘watched’ n met name severe storm “approaching. Within minutes, the storm smashed the window, or welke ze ulcers not rechtstreeks in front prolongation the crisis. ^[21]

He has written dat he has some majoritarian difficulty with visual encoding , “a cat dat I seem to share with Aldous Huxley ,” Whom Johnson quotes at grotere length in Mind Wide Open dan Cited here: “I am and, for as long as i can remember, I Have always leg 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 drag. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. In an effort of the will, i can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon … ” ^[22]

Books

References