Steven Johnson's Blog, page 4

Good Ideas: The First Reviews

Where Good Ideas Come From doesn't officially hit the shelves until Tuesday, but a handful of reviews started running in the past few days.

• In Portland, where I will be speaking at the end of this week, The Oregonian said my "'long zoom' view of fertile idea-ecosystems is engaging, informative and, well, inspirational." (Though I was a bit too glib about new tech platforms like Twitter apparently.)

• The Economist calls Good Ideas "the grand synthesis" of my other six books, which I think is a compliment, assuming they don't think the other six books are awful. It's a joint review with Kevin Kelly's superb What Technology Wants, and if you like that particular cocktail, you should read this fun Wired conversation between Kevin and me. (And then buy tickets for our joint event at the New York Public Library.)

• In Seattle, where I will also be appearing this week, the Times runs a very nice review that ends with this paragraph: "Johnson's own interest stops him short of saying patents and copyrights should be thrown out altogether. People who create intellectual property, including books like this, need to be paid — an argument, writes Johnson, 'I am more than sympathetic toward.' No doubt that goes also for his publisher, Riverhead Books, which is owned by Penguin, which is owned by Pearson, a great corporation based in London." I will have more to say on this theme in the coming weeks, but suffice to say that there are multiple reasons why copyright and patent law shouldn't be thrown out altogether, most of which have nothing to do with my commercial interests, and the book discusses them at some length.

• It's behind a paywall, so you're just going to have to trust me on this, but the Sunday Times in the UK ran a review this morning that began by calling Good Ideas "an exhilarating, idea-thirsty book."

• Finally, last week's Publisher's Weekly ran a long interview with me that discussed Good Ideas, but also went into some detail about my thoughts on the future of digital books, and my frustrations with the forced limitations of today's e-book software.  

 

Good Ideas, The Four-Minute Version

I have to admit when the good folks at Riverhead mentioned that they were working on an animated video promoting Where Good Ideas Come From, I wasn't fully convinced it was going to be worth the effort. But the absolutely brilliant video they produced with Cognitive Media in the UK shows how wrong I was. It's genuinely worth watching multiple times, which is something I've certainly never said before about a book promo. Just four days after we released it, it's been viewed almost 100,000...

Tools For New Thoughts: A Special Webinar For "Early Adopters" Of My Book

Where Good Ideas Come From is an idea book about the history of ideas, but I have always thought of it as a book that would have real practical value as well. So laced through the seven chapters on the different patterns of innovation, in between all the stories of world-changing creativity, there are a number of passages that talk about useful tools or strategies for bringing some of these insights into your own life. Yet there's much more to be said about this topic.

And so, as a special...

Deep Structure

If there's one thing I'm known for as a writer, it's my habit of writing across disciplines, connecting multiple fields in a single book or narrative. My sense from talking to readers and following the reviews is that if you like my books, the discipline-jumping is one of the main attractions, and if the books rub you the wrong way (as in this review of Invention of Air from last year) it's the connections that grate.

But the truth is I haven't written a truly multi-disciplinary book for near...

Tour Dates for "Where Good Ideas Come From"

The folks at Riverhead have put together a great tour for Where Good Ideas Come From. It's going to be a busy October, but it should also be a lot of fun. Here are the details for now; I will update as new events get added...

Washington,
D.C.

Tuesday,
October 5, 7:00 PM

Politics
& Prose

5015
Connecticut Ave NW

Washington,
DC 20008

202-364-1919

 

Seattle,
WA

Wednesday,
October 6, 7:30 PM

Barnes
& Noble University Village

2675
NE University...

The Shanghai Surprise: Urban Planning Is Sexy!

 




I'm writing this on the plane flying back after a ten day trip circumnavigating the globe. I started in Oxford (for the wonderful TEDGlobal conference) where my wife and I walked alongside the ancient wall built around the original town limits. I ended it taking the 200 mph MagLev train to the Shanghai airport. In other words, the trip started in the 12th century, and ended in the 22nd. 



On my last morning in Shanghai, thanks to many Twitter recommendations, I visited the Urban...

Introducing Appify

Wherever you happen to fall in the debate over the proper App Store model--whether you think Apple's store is too authoritarian, or Google's too anarchic--there is one thing I think most reasonable people can agree on: with hundreds of thousands of apps available, and a million no doubt in the near-term pipeline, we need a richer set of tools and services for exploring and discovering new apps. The mobile app ecosystem is arguably the most interesting and rapidly diversifying region of the so...

More On The Shallows

In today's New York Times I have an essay responding to Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows. While I disagree with the overarching conclusions of Nick's book, it's a great read and wonderfully written, with many fascinating detours through the history of media and technology.  I encourage everyone to pick it up.

I wanted to post a few additional comments on the Times piece. The crux of my disagreement with Nick is spelled out in this section of the essay:

The problem with Mr. Carr's model...

Where Good Ideas Come From

On
Friday, I got the galley copies of my new book, to be published in early
October. It's called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of
Innovation. I've been working on this one for almost five years now, though in
some ways the idea for it is almost a decade old. The subject of the book is
right there in the title: it's a book that tries to grapple with the question
of why certain environments seem to be disproportionately skilled at generating
and sharing good ideas. It's a...

Is Steve Jobs Repeating His Past Mistakes?

One of my very favorite writers, Robert Wright, had an interesting Opinionator post at the NY Times site this week, which revolved around the question of Steve Jobs' alleged lust for power and why he was making the same mistakes with the iPhone that led to the Mac losing out to Microsoft in the late 1980s. I quote at some length:

The Microsoft approach harnessed positive feedback. The more models of Windows computers, competitively priced, the more people would buy Windows computers. And the...