Adaptive Path Blog

In the conclusion of Jesse James Garrett’s conversation with author Steven Johnson, they discuss his writing career, his recent bestseller Everything Bad Is Good For You, and his upcoming book The Ghost Map. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off Day 1 of User Experience Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.

Jesse James Garrett: One major part of the mass culture that is omitted from Everything Bad is music. Do you think music is immune to the drive toward complexity you see happening in other media? If not, how is that complexity manifesting?

Steven Johnson: I didn’t include music because enjoying or understanding music isn’t quite the same sort of problem-solving experience that you find in decoding a narrative or making sense of a video game. The question of why music is so powerful to the human brain is one of the great, enduring mysteries, but clearly it’s much more intimately connected to the brain’s emotional centers than the kind of abstract reasoning skills I was writing about in Everything Bad. So I decided to carve it out.

JJG: You probably could have devoted an entire chapter of Everything Bad solely to the television show “Lost,” which embodies many of the narrative principles you describe with its multi-layered storytelling that rewards ever-deeper scrutiny. The show’s producers have also been pushing boundaries by extending the show’s narrative into other media, with various fictional Web sites, a novel, and now an entire alternate-reality game, “The Lost Experience.” Is “Lost” establishing a new model for cross-media entertainment that is likely to persist, or is it an oddity that we shouldn’t expect to see replicated?

SJ: Oh, I think it’s certainly a sign of things to come. Interestingly, some of the techniques that you describe — the extensions into other media, integration with Web community and discussion, game spinoffs — are all techniques that have also been explored by the reality shows of late, which are of course the great example of formal complexity and innovation matched with largely trivial content.

JJG: The writer you seem to be compared to most often is Malcolm Gladwell. Do you see your work as covering similar territory as Gladwell’s, or do you think you’re pursuing different goals?

SJ: I’m a big fan of Malcolm’s, and so being compared to him is always flattering. I think because he’s had so much commercial success, and because he has such an easy, accessible voice on the page, people sometimes underestimate how hard it is to do what he does. I’m so glad he’s blogging now, because it’s great for him to have the vehicle — when the books or articles come out — to respond to the critics, and expand the ideas a little.

We have a lot of shared interests, both in topics — Emergence and The Tipping Point are variations on a theme, as are Blink and Mind Wide Open — and in approach. I suppose the most significant difference thus far is that I’ve been more focused on writing books, and he’s been more focused on doing magazine pieces. But that might change, for both of us, I imagine.

JJG: Back when you were running FEED, you seemed to be most interested in cultural criticism, but since then your work has taken a sharp turn into science journalism. What prompted this transition, and what do you see as the connection between these areas of interest?

SJ: The first step was that I looked up at my bookshelf one day and realized that the last 15 books I’d read had been science books. So I thought: if this is what I want to read, maybe it’s what I should write. And then I read E.O. Wilson’s Consilience and thought: I love every bit of this except for the part where he talks about culture. I thought: it would be nice to have someone who came out of a culture crit background who was genuinely building bridges to the science, and not deconstructing it. And really, ever since then, that’s what all my books have been trying to do, in their different ways — to write about culture in ways that are genuinely open to the insights of science, where they’re appropriate.

JJG: Your upcoming book The Ghost Map tells the story of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. What drew you to this story?

SJ: I’d known about the story for many years, and I’d been looking for a way to write a book that would have a sustained historical narrative that I could use as a kind of scaffolding to support some of the ideas and themes I’m interested in. My other books have all been more-or-less pure idea books, with short narratives occasionally introduced almost as color. The story of John Snow and Henry Whitehead solving the mystery of this cholera epidemic — and, in Snow’s case, solving the mystery of cholera itself — struck me as an amazing intersection of many of the themes I’ve been following over the years: urban life, the connections between science and culture, information design, thinking across scales of experience, amateur expertise, and so on. And as you can tell from reading Interface Culture, my grad school years were spent studying the nineteenth-century Victorian novel, and so I knew the period quite well.

JJG: Edward Tufte has suggested that information design played a vital role in containing the outbreak. What do you think?

SJ: Tufte played a huge role in popularizing the story — to this day, most of the people I meet who are familiar with it read about it in Tufte first. He actually wrote about it twice, originally in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and then a longer section in Visual Explanations. His original assessment was factually wrong on a number of fronts — it greatly overstated the role of the map in solving the mystery of where the cholera was coming from, and the map itself that Tufte included was a heavily modified replica created for a 1912 textbook on public health. In the later book, he got the story right, though I think he’s a little too bullish on the map’s originality as a work of information design.

Basically, the argument that I make at the end of The Ghost Map is that the map was not a tool for solving or containing the outbreak, but rather a tool for explaining to others how the outbreak had come about — effectively, convincing them that the cholera was in the water, not the air, which was Snow’s great insight. But what made the map so original as a document is that it drew upon the local knowledge of the neighborhood itself: both Snow and his collaborator Henry Whitehead were residents of Soho, and had to do a great deal of shoe-leather detective work to figure out who had died, and who had consumed water from the contaminated pump. So the map is not just a triumph of information design; it’s also triumph of a certain mode of engaged, urban amateur expertise: local experts representing their own neighborhoods. There’s an immediate connection here to the whole Neo-Geo wave of Google map experimentation going on, which is one of the themes I discuss at the end of the book.

JJG: Is The Ghost Map an extension of your earlier work, or a departure?

SJ: It’s a departure in the sense it does tell a sustained story, and has — I hope — a page-turner quality to it. But thematically, it is very much an extension — mostly of Interface Culture and Emergence. I describe it sometimes as a kind of fractal way of writing history: it’s the story of one terrible week in 1854, but it’s an attempt at the same time to tell that story simultaneously on multiple scales of experience: from the bacteria itself, to the individual human lives of Snow and Whitehead and their nemeses, to the broader cultural trends of the time, all the way up to the super-organism of London itself. When I was a few chapters into writing it, I was describing it to my editor, Sean McDonald, and I was saying that it reminded me of Emergence, if Emergence had been a disease thriller. And Sean nodded, and said: “Right. It’s like Emergence if the slime mold had started killing people in Chapter Three.”

JJG: Thanks Steven, and we look forward to hearing your keynote at UX Week in D.C. on August 14!

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