Steven Johnson's Blog

Two nights ago in London, Brian Eno and I did the second in what I hope will be a long series of public conversations at the wonderful ICA. It was a very special night, and I think everyone seemed to enjoy the discussion, which roamed from Joseph Priestley to the British art school scene of the late 1960s to Twitter and the iPhone application environment. I gather the ICA will upload a podcast of it shortly, and I'll link to that when they do.

But my favorite moment of the night came at the ...

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In his essay introducing The Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno tells the story of visiting a wealthy friend in her downtown loft, in an otherwise destitute neighborhood of Manhattan circa 1978:

I just didn't understand. Why would anyone spend so much money building a place like that in a neighbourhood like this? Later I got into conversation with the hostess. "Do you like it here?" I asked. "It's the best place I've ever lived", she replied. "But I mean, you know, is it an interesting...

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Here's the lineup for this fall -- it's going to be a busy one! If you're in any of these locales, drop by and say hello...

September 21  Princeton, NJ
The Myth of the Echo Chamber: Politics in the Age of the Participatory Web
The Stafford Little Lecture at Princeton University.

September 24  Ottawa, Ontario
Keynote
National Cancer Leadership Forum

September 25 Saint Paul, MN
"The Ghost Map" Keynote

American Association for the History of Nursing Conference

September 30 New Haven, CT
Panel on "Best...

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The editors at Yale University Press were nice enough to invite me to edit this year's edition of Best Technology Writing. It's a great collection of essays, by some of my very favorite writers, and I encourage you to pick up a copy. I wrote an opening essay for the book that tries to wrestle with the ways in which technology writing has changed over the past few decades. Here's a section of it:

The ubiquity of the digital lifestyle has forced us to write and think about technology in a...

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Today's an exciting day at outside.in: we're rolling out the beta release of Outside.in for Publishers, a suite of tools for organizing and curating hyperlocal news pages for US cities and towns. There's a great post from our CEO Mark Josephson here explaining the service and the vision behind it.

A few months ago I gave a talk at SXSW talking about the ways in which the news business was moving towards an ecosystem model.

OIP is our bid to help make that ecosystem healthier and more diver

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This week's cover of TIME features a story that I wrote about Twitter and innovation. Actually, that's not quite right: this week's cover features a tweet that I posted about the cover story I wrote for TIME about Twitter. I've been chuckling about this cover ever since the folks at TIME proposed it. What I love is that we actually synced everything up so that the cover shows an actual word-for-word tweet that I posted this morning, right before TIME's Rick Stengel revealed the cover on Morning

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The folks at the Wall Street Journal very nicely asked me to write a cover story for their Journal Report on technology, which is on the stands today. The piece is here online, but if you get a chance, check in out in print (ironic, I know.) They dedicated the whole front page of the section to the story, which is really cool to see. (It's also teased above the masthead on the front page.) There are about a dozen different predictions running through the piece, some of the positive, some negativ

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A few weeks after the book tour for The Invention of Air started to wind down, I got an email from an old friend who had spent some time with Bill Clinton at Davos. It was a quick note to report that Clinton had apparently spontaneously brought up my book in conversation, and had said some nice things about it. 

That was very cool to hear, obviously, but hearing it immediately introduced a whole new set of questions: how had he heard about the book? What exactly did he like about it? And was this

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I'd been meaning to do a follow-up post collecting the responses to my SXSW speech on "Old Growth Media And The Future of News," but I kept putting it off because new articles and posts continued to roll in, and stitching them all together started to seem a little daunting. I've certainly never given a speech that generated so much discussion before, which tells you a little about how passionate people are about this issue right now.

The volume of response also underscores the value of releasi

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The following is a speech I gave yesterday at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.

 
I

If you happened to be hanging out in
front of the old College Hill Bookstore in Providence Rhode Island in
1987, on the third week of every month you would have seen a skinny
19-year-old in baggy pants, sporting a vaguely Morrissey-like haircut,
walking into the bookstore several times a day.

That kid was me. I wish I could tell you that I was making those compulsive return visits out

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