Steven Johnson's Blog, page 5

A (Slightly Amended) History Of Webism

There's a lovely and typically astute installment of "The Intellectual Situation" in the latest n+1, which in my book is the most interesting small magazine to appear in at least a decade, that takes on the topic of what they call "webism." It's worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to respond to (and gently correct) this passage. I quote from it at length here so you get some of the context:

The early web magazines were Slate, Salon, Feed, and Suck—as with the best print magazines, you...

The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

[image error] The following is a transcript of the Hearst New Media lecture I gave last night at Columbia University, subtitled "Two Paths For The Future of Text." Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the Journalism school for the invitation.

I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in...

What Does "Generative" Mean Anyway?

Today's Sunday New York Times included a column of mine in the business section which tried to think about the App Store's tremendous rate of innovation over the past two years, and the clear benefit it has had for small developers. My general point was that, while many of us have worked under the assumption that open platforms tend to be more "generative," in some important ways, the closed architecture of the App Store and the iPhone OS has actually contributed to the generativity of the...

Does Apple Think Multitasking Is A Bug Not A Feature? And Other Questions....

I wrote a little essay for Time.com on the iPad launch (and the reactions to it.) Here's the opening riff:

If you time-traveled back to 1995, and asked the leading futurists

of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well

have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces

as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of

software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools,

the story went, and too little...

CNN Invests in Outside.In

I've been saying for a while now that for outside.in,
2009 has been the year of building platforms. We spent the first months
of the year building out our Outside.in For Publishers platform, which
is now used by more than a hundred news organizations around the
country. This fall, we brought our core site over onto a new, lightning-fast architecture that enabled true geographic search. And now, this
morning the Wall Street Journal is running the news that we've just
closed a $7 million B...

Brian Eno Renames My Book

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 ...

Searching The "Small Here"

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...

My fall speaking schedule

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...

Skim and Plunge

 

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...

OIP and the news ecosystem

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