Steven Johnson (2014)

I know this sounds like I am preaching to the choir, but honestly, sites like Reddit are a great place for that kind of inspiration. For me, I've tried to cultivate a diverse "coffeehouse" of people that I follow on Twitter: writers, scientists, musicians, politicians, etc. They're constantly recommending stories or albums or films that I had no idea I'd be interested in. Those are my "parts on the table."

One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg's printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn't really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways. I love that story because I thought I knew the story of Gutenberg's influence, but it turned out to have this other strand that had never occurred to me.

Certainly political bias shapes a great deal of how we think about the world. But in a way, one of the interesting things that I tried to write about is how scientific/technological ideas shape our political bias as well -- the way new technologies make new political alliances possible. Air conditioning, for instance, ends up re-drawing the political map of the United States after millions of people move to the Sun Belt, etc.

I've been following reddit for years, but have never done an AMA before. And also, the site we created fourteen years ago, Plastic.com, was very similar to Reddit in many ways, so the format is something I've always loved.

Probably Ghost Map, because I thought I already knew the story when I sat down to write it: lone genius John Snow makes a map of a cholera epidemic and discovers that the disease is caused by contaminated drinking water. But once I dug into the research, I found out that it was much more complicated, and interesting: Snow had been tinkering with the waterborne theory for years, and he had some very important collaborators who were crucial to the story.

From everywhere! But often from being too locked into a single point of view. That's the beauty of collaborative networks where the participants have different fields of expertise (a big theme of the show and the book, BTW). It's so much harder to get locked into a mistake when you're constantly bouncing ideas of off people. If there is too much similarity in a group, you can get mistakes that emerge from a kind of herd mentality or groupthink. But if you diversify that's not as much of a problem.

As you know from that post, we were planning on moving back after two years, but we liked it so much that we decided to stay for three years, and then we liked it so much (but missed Brooklyn too) that we have now decided to try to live on both coasts. I'm typing this in Brooklyn very happily, but missing California -- fortunately I'm going to be there three times next month.

I think Everything Bad has held up very well in terms of TV. There is a general consensus that television is having its Golden Age right now, and certainly the complexity of the stories has been increasing on average. It was a much more contrarian argument in 2004-5. With games, the one thing that I didn't see coming were the mobile games, which obviously got much simpler and more elemental than the SimCity-style games that I celebrated in that book. But the main thing that I think about now that I have older children is how addictive the games can be. If I were writing the book now, I would talk more about the downside of that.

Not entirely -- we have a few women (Hedy Lamar, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, etc) and a few African- and Native-Americans who played interested role in the history of refrigeration. But because so much of it is set in the 18th- and 19th century, it is dominated by the stories of white men, for sure. We really spent a lot of time trying to include a diverse group of people in terms of the experts that I talk to in the show, since the history, given the nature of society back then, was so limited.

How cool -- I will spend more time on it when I'm not furiously answering questions on Reddit!

Ah, that's a great question. It's such a wonderful time to be interested in interface design (the topic of my first book!) I still think one of the coolest UIs in the past five years was Apple's design for GarageBand for the iPad. So many interesting tweaks in there -- taking metaphors from physical instruments where appropriate (strumming strings) but also reinventing them given the flexibility of the computer screen itself (chord progressions mapped onto the fretboard, etc.) It made me wish Apple would design a completely new instrument from scratch for the touch UI.

You know, it's funny, I actually don't watch a ton of documentary shows -- I had to go and sit down and familiarize myself a bit with the genre when we started working on ours. Every since my second book, Emergence, people have been telling me that my work reminds them of the great BBC series Connections (and its sequels) which I had never seen as a kid. But I went back and watched/read them after I kept hearing this from people. How We Got To Now has a similar approach to history as James Burkes's shows/books, though stylistically they are quite different.

In terms of what I actually watch, because I have three pre-teen boys, we have watched an insane amount of Man vs. Wild in our house.

I am indeed your father. Sorry to break it to you in this context. Now go clean up your room!

It really depends on the book. I wrote the first draft of Everything Bad Is Good For You in about three months. Good Ideas took about 8 months to write, but almost four years to research. (Invention of Air was in a way part of the research for that book.) When I'm working, I just try to write 500 words a day, usually in the morning over the first or second cup of coffee. If you do that every day for a few months, you have a book!

my biggest problem is that I read very quickly, and so audiobooks have always seemed too slow for me, though I gather you can listen in accelerated mode. also, until we moved to California three years ago, I never drove anywhere because we were living in NYC. I should have tried it when we were living in CA full time, though I actually enjoyed that car time for making phone calls to friends/family (which I was notoriously bad at doing back in NY.)

I used to have researchers back in the day when you really needed to go to libraries to track down obscure periodicals or out-of-print books. So they were there mostly to bring me stuff from the library, and type up quotations that I find interesting in the books so that I had a searchable database of all my notes. But starting around 2007, Google Scholar/Books and then the Kindle made all of that unnecessary, so I didn't have as much help for the last three books. But we had amazing researchers helping with the PBS series, which then fed into the material in the book.

Yes -- that's a very fun one. Lots of overlap, but of course, that's what we were both trying to champion in those projects.

I think Dawkins' idea of the meme is very intriguing. As he himself has said, the "gene"/"meme" analogy isn't really the right one; the way memes work is closer to a virus than piece of genetic code. But I think the premise that ideas that we inherit from our historical moment shape us -- limiting our ideas, but also suggesting new ones -- is clearly true. That's one of the things that I tried to examine in the book and the show.

I will try to read that blog post late today when I have more time. But for now, let me say that I wrote a series on Medium about my tricks and techniques for researching and writing books. It's called The Writer's Room.

If you mean, are there new innovations in the works that will be as important as the ones profiled in the show and book: yes! In fact, we created a whole web site at howwegettonext.com to profile those. The show and the book are in many ways about our history, but we always wanted to have a venue that could be forwarded looking, and continually updated with new stories. So check that out...

How We Got To Now, both the book and the series, developed out of my work in Good Ideas, so that's a logical place to start. It takes on innovation from a different angle -- starting with the objects themselves and working backwards through the history -- but if you liked Good Ideas you will definitely enjoy these new projects.

I haven't seen the e-book versions, but the one thing I will say about the print version of How We Got To Now is that it is beautiful. Full-color illustrations, really nice paper stock. Definitely the nicest quality book I have ever written. So you might want to check it out at the bookstore first. At the very least, it makes a very elegant Christmas present! (Shameless, I know.)

Not sure I have a single fave, but here are a few: Middlemarch (I was a grad student in English lit, so it has to be on the list); The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (also from grad school years.) How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand. 10,000 years of Non-linear History, by Manuel De Landa. Nonzero by Robert Wright. That's a start.

Yes, I battle that all the time. With the "straight" history books like Ghost Map and Invention of Air, I was grounded in a certain chronological sequence, so in a way it was easier to go off on a tangent because I knew I always had to return to the plot. The hardest one from an organizational point of view was Good Ideas, because it had no natural structure, and basically, from a research point of view, it could theoretically include any good idea that anyone had had over the course of human history. So I spent almost a year trying to figure out how to give that book a coherent shape.

Yeah, I feel bad about that. I actually have never done the audio book narration. I really should have with the ones that were more personal, like Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad. With this one, the time to record the audio book came just after I had spent days and day in a studio recording voiceover for the series, and honestly I was a little burned out. Forgive me!

I think there is a bit of a bias on my part in that I have never listened to audiobooks personally, so somehow sitting in a studio and reading my own words aloud -- at precisely the point in the process when I am most sick of them -- always seems like something I can get out of...

I think it works two ways: you're sitting on all this exciting new material -- sometimes for years -- and you really want to share it. Or sometimes you don't realize that the material you've just put into an article or a blog post is going to be useful to a book until you put it out into the world, and then you realize: hey, that's a keeper.

I've gone two ways: some of my books you can really tell what I'm working on by looking at my posts or articles leading up to it; and some of them I've basically kept under wraps. How We Got To Now is largely in the latter camp -- I'm really excited to finally be able to talk about all these stories after working on this for more than three years!

It's good to be back!