stevenberlinjohnson.com: Watching The Watchers

My new Discover column, "Watching The Watchers," is online. This one's about the fascinating Government Information Awareness site that tracks and filters a vast web of data about government officials. (It's explicitly designed as a mirror image version of Poindexter's Total Information Awareness.) Here's a taste:

"Every piece of information is annotated with information about who entered it," [site creator Ryan] McKinley explains. "Everything can be ranked for veracity and interest. The hope is with that you can come up with pretty simple rules to keep out the things that would make this kind of database unusable. I honestly believe that there's enough genuine interest out there for people to put time into this, and so the amount of garbage that goes in will be pretty small." If the approach works, the garbage will be quickly spotted and demoted by the users of the site, while quality information will rise to the surface. High-rated contributors might rise up as well.

The self-policing of the site makes for an arresting sociological experiment. Most of the time, the trust ratings of eBay manage to block an individual's financial incentive to misrepresent information online. Will a similar approach work when the incentive is ideological instead of financial? Systems that self-regulate by following predictable rules can be gamed, of course. A group of users could agree to rate their own contributions highly and downgrade everyone else's. If they reached a critical mass, they could significantly alter the perspective of the database. It would take a lot of work –– and a lot spare time –– but ordinary people have done a lot of extraordinary things on the Web in their spare time.

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of seven books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

My Books

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
An exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books. Sold more copies in hardcover than anything else I've written.
The Invention of Air
The story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!