10 Questions With Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson is one of the most influential popular science thinkers of our time. The author of eight books, including “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter” and “Where Good Ideas Come From,” and co-founder of three websites, Johnson talked to FM about hunches, heroes, and the human experience in an urbanizing world.
1. You majored in semiotics at Brown. What does that mean?
Semiotics was effectively a media studies major with a heavy dose of French twentieth century philosophy. You were interpreting the world of media and the world of advertising, and it was as if there was a secret code that you could use to make sense of them, a hidden meaning in all these popular forms. But it set me up very nicely for when the web first really blossomed in the mid-ninties. I had spent all of this time studying media and thinking about hypertextuality in traditional books, and suddenly there was this hyptertext medium that actually was real hypertext.
2. At this point you’ve written eight books, spanning in subject matter from a cholera outbreak in 19th century London to why videogames are engaging. How do you decide what to write?
In my last book I talk about the slow hunch. You have these ideas where you start thinking about them a little bit in the back of your mind, or somebody says something to you that plants one seed, then two years later somebody else plants another seed, and if you keep those hunches alive eventually they hit a critical mass. They eventually get to this point where they start gathering up and they’re like this swarm that you can’t ignore anymore.
3. What underlying themes unite your books?
I used to think of my books as being very different. But when I was writing “Where Good Ideas Come From,” I consciously thought of that book as a trilogy with “Ghost Map” and “Invention of Air,” both of which were books of world-changing ideas and the environments that made them possible. Those were case studies in innovators of the past, and “Good Ideas” was the theory. But then I finished and realized that all of my books had been about innovation in some way or another. They were about new ideas that were coming into being and new scientific developments, new forms of entertainment or media.
4. Where do you see your work fitting into the current intellectual landscape?
I used to think of myself as a public intellectual in the sense that I was trying to write for both a popular audience and an academic audience. Like in “Everything Bad is Good for You,” I was trying to write a book that would be interesting to people who were teaching media theory classes and also interesting to 15 year olds who wanted to convince their parents that video games weren’t rotting their brains. It’s hard to write on those levels. What changed and surprised me was that I ended up having this other side of my career of building things, of doing these web companies and web products or tools over the years.
5. And how did you become involved in those initiatives?
I’d always been really interested in computers, and this is one of those things where generationally it’s really funny to think back, but when I was in college, computers were not cool at all. I was really into my Mac—I was into all of that page layout stuff—but my friends were all art kids so they would come by and I’d be like, “You’ve gotta see this new program!” And they were like, “Steven, don’t show that to people. That’s really not cool.”
