Mapping the future—the impact of science,
technology and media on modern life.

Highlights

Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of six books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His writings have influenced everything from the way political campaigns use the Internet, to cutting-edge ideas in urban planning, to the battle against 21st-century terrorism.

Steven's most recent book The Invention of Air tells the story of Joseph Priestly, the Founding Fathers, and how innovative ideas emerge and spread in society and drive historical change. Like his award-winning previous book, The Ghost Map, The Invention of Air uses a surprising historical and biographical narrative to discuss ideas that have profoundly shaped our modern world.

The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly. Drawn from one of the defining moments in the invention of modern life—the emergence of modern public health during the London cholera epidemic of 1854—The Ghost Map is a gripping case study in how change happens, the turbulent way in which wrong or ineffectual ideas are overthrown by better ones.

Steven has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in.

Both social critic and technologist, Steven has a genius for mapping the future—for predicting and explaining the real-world impact of cutting-edge developments in science, technology and media.

Steven is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and is the 2009 Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence at The Journalism School, Columbia University. He lectures widely on technological, scientific, and cultural issues.

Steven has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other periodicals. He's appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He blogs at stevenberlinjohnson.com.

Steven is an articulate and thought-provoking, funny, animated and engaging speaker.

The Invention of Air

A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

Innovation and the way new ideas emerge and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs.

In the dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion that made The Ghost Map and Steven Berlin Johnson's other books so effective, his next book, The Invention of Air, is a book of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling historical narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.

It is the story of Joseph Priestley—British scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an 18^th century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. Best known as the discoverer of oxygen, he is less well known as the first person to realize, in 1771, that plants created oxygen. Thus was born the idea of ecosystems—the air we breathe is not some given but manufactured by other organisms as part of a wider system on the planet.

Moreover, Priestly was a kind of lost Founding Father—best friends with Franklin, a huge influence on Jefferson's eclectic Christianity, and helping to thoroughly integrate science into the Founding Fathers' worldviews.

Mapping the Future

In all his work—books, articles, speeches, online projects—Steven Johnson has consistently been ahead of the curve. He is not so much a futurist in the sense of someone who talks about where we’re going to be in the next ‘x’ number of years, but he has a great track record of seeing emerging trends and explaining why they’re immediately relevant to both personal life and business.

Steven was one of the very first to grasp the transformative power of the web on journalism when he launched the website FEED.

His book Interface Culture predicted the rise of the blogosphere.

His website Plastic was one of the very first Web 2.0 user-centric sites.

His book Emergence foresaw many of the Web 2.0 developments and their impact on politics and society.

His book Everything Bad Is Good For You grasped the new complexity of popular culture before anyone else.

Ghost Map and outside.in are now engaged in the new project of hyperlocal media.

outside.in

outside.in is Steven’s latest online project, a website that, for the first time, gathers in one place online conversations about local places (http://outside.in/). Just enter your zip code or the name of your neighborhood and suddenly you have access to all the interesting things that are happening in your neighborhood and conversations about your neighborhood. This hyperlocal media helps you stay up to date on what’s going on, discover new things about where you live, do research, and contribute to the local conversation yourself. Or, if your neighborhood hasn’t been entered yet, to start the conversation.

Books

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America uses historical and biographical narrative to describe how innovative ideas emerge and spread in society, in the fashion of Steven's previous book The Ghost Map. The biography centers on Joseph Priestly, perhaps best known for having discovered oxygen, and much less well known for discovering that the source of oxygen was plants. But this 18^th century British scientist was more than just the inventor of ecosystem science, as earth-shaking as that was; he also helped found the Unitarian Church in England and deeply influenced the Founding Fathers and the early character of the republic.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World is a thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London—and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world. A triumph of the kind of multidisciplinary thinking for which Steven’s become famous, this book is full vivid history, great storytelling and valuable insights into how these events shaped the world in which we live. The Ghost Map was a runner-up for the National Academies of Science award for best science book of 2007.

Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter was one of the most talked about books of 2005. It argues that the increasing complexity of tv, films and especially today’s video games are teaching us to think in more complex ways. They are actually making us smarter by giving us a cognitive workout.

Mind Wide Open describes how the new brain science is yielding new understandings of human personality and explains their practical relevance to everyday life—office politics, creative thinking, family conflicts, and emotional decision-making. The only book in which Steven himself appears as a recurring character.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software is the story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Its discussion of self-organization and "emergent behavior" and their implications for business, government and society has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror. Made four prestigious "Best Book of the Year" lists, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.

The Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate is a fascinating cultural history and analysis of the interfaces we use all the time in the digital age and how technology transforms society.

To learn more about Steven Berlin Johnson, please visit his website, at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com, which features his blog.

Topics

Mapping the Future
Everything Bad Is Good for You—How popular culture is making us smarter
Creativity and the Brain—Where do great ideas come from?
How Groups Learn—Bottom-up Intelligence and Self-organization
The Future of the Internet—The emergence of an interface culture

Credentials

• Author of three national bestsellers
• Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence, The Journalism School at Columbia University, 2009
• Monthly columnist, Discover magazine
• Contributing editor, Wired magazine
• Former Distinguished Writer In Residence, NYU Dept of Journalism
• Finalist for 2002 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, Emergence
• Co-founder and editor-in-chief, FEED
• Named one of the "Fifty People Who Matter Most on the Internet," Newsweek