stevenberlinjohnson.com

Me, Me, Me

So Mind Wide Open shot up to #95 on the Amazon Sales Rank list overnight, which is a pretty great place to be ten days before the official publication date. More entertaining, perhaps, is the fact that the book is #9 on the general self-help bestseller list -- right up there with Dr. Phil and Who Moved My Cheese? Let the healing begin!

Years ago, when my first book came out, the publisher booked me to do a signing at a completely random Borders in the middle of Boston's financial district, for which not one single person showed up. Not even a straggler lost in the Pet Care section who felt sorry for me. I just sat there for thirty minutes talking awkwardly with the store representative and then packed up my bag and left.

I tell you that story not because I'm worried that this will actually happen again, but just so you don't get too irritated over the next month or so when I mention bookstore appearances in this space. Here's the first such mention: I'm going to be doing my first bookstore talk and signing in Seattle this Thursday at 7PM, at the University Bookstore (located at 4327 University Way.) So those of you in the Seattle area -- or really anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, and southern Canada, and perhaps the Anchorage area -- please come by and say hi. I promise to tell many delightful stories about my brain, and, like John Kerry, stay around and field questions until every one of you has decided to vote for me for President.

One other bit of self-promotion: apparently I will appear on ABC Nightline tonight, in a story they've put together on MoveOn and bottom-up political movements generally. They came by a week or so ago and talked to me for about an hour, which -- if my past television experience is any guide -- probably means that I will appear on camera for three-and-a-half seconds, during which time I will say something along the lines of, "The Internet is, like, totally cool." But I'm sure the rest of the story will be informative.

Our Fragmented Web

I think Amy Harmon is a terrific writer, and she's done countless pieces over the years that have been dead right about the net and its social impact. But like Jeff Jarvis and a few others, I find this whole "the web is fragmenting society" argument completely infuriating. (I've been railing against it for almost a decade now, but I just can't help myself.) In this latest piece, it's just entirely taken as a given that the web is dropping us all into echo chambers where we can only hear like-minded voices. There are people quoted who disagree about what should be done with this phenomenon, but the underlying trend isn't questioned.

I find this to be one of those bizarro bits of conventional wisdom, where exactly the opposite is true. The reason we have so many filters and personalization tools is because the web has created a veritable Cambrian explosion of diversity, funneled directly to your home -- social, political, sexual, ethical, you name it. There are literally millions more points of view available to you today in your own home then there were fifteen years ago. We have filters because the web has unleashed so much diversity, not because we have too little.

Take this quote from Harmon's piece:

The Internet became the ultimate tool for finding like minds and blocking out others long before supporters of candidates began seeking one another out on Meetup.com. With online dating sites where searches can be tailored by age and income, e-mail forums for the most narrow band of subjects, bookmarked sites and even spam filters, the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium. Social scientists even have a term for it: cyberbalkanization.

Slow down and work through the logic here: spam filters are invoked as yet another indication of the echo-chamber effect. Now, who is winning right now: the spam or the filters? Obviously, the spam is winning -- nobody's walking around complaining that they miss the days when they'd get a completely spontaneous penis-enlargement ad in their inbox, despite the fact that they're opposed to penis-enlargement in general. The filters are there because there are so many voices flooding our inboxes and our browsers that we need tools to fight back. You don't have filters on television or old-fashioned newspapers because you don't need them -- there's not enough diversity and chaos to justify them. But the web -- and particularly the blogosphere -- is far more eclectic and cross-pollinating than any of those older media. That's the real story. Writing about the rise of filters as a sign of web insularity is like writing about the heat wave we're having here in New York right now because everyone's bundled up in parkas.

New Hampshire On My Mind

A few brief thoughts on the week's developments:

1. I know I posted on Monday night that I had a gut feeling Dean had lost the nomination with that speech, but after all the remixes and the endless scrutiny, it is seriously time to cut the guy some slack. Clearly he was playing to the room, not the cameras, which was a stupid thing to do at that particular moment, but every other day of the year we bitch and moan about our politicians always playing to the cameras, and never doing anything spontaneous. This is what it looks like when fifty-something white guys do something spontaneous. It isn't pretty. But I thought we were tired of pretty...

2. I continue to have a weird gut feeling that Edwards is actually going to win this thing, though it's really, really hard to figure out how he makes it through March economically. Would love to hear theories that can explain how he pulls it off.

3. A technical question: let's say for the sake of argument that Dean finishes third in New Hampshire, and implodes on February 3rd. And everybody but Kerry and Edwards has dropped out, after the 10th. At that point, it's pretty clear that Dean can't win, but he's still sitting on a huge pile of cash. What does he do with it, if he decides to drop out? What can he do with it, legally? Can he give it to another candidate? To MoveOn? To the DNC?

4. Most irritating moment in the Primetime interview tonight: Diane Sawyer fumbling for what to call Dean's wife. "Dr. Steinberg... I mean, Mrs. Dean -- what should I call you?" Um, couldn't you have worked that one out in the pre-interview? The woman does her first television interview in her life, and she has to spend the first minute explaining her name? I didn't hear Sawyer saying "Doctor, I mean Governor, Dean -- what should I call you? Your Honorable? It's all so confusing..."

5. As for the interview itself, they seemed like a completely adorable couple: very honest and real, very Vermont crunchy with their family bike rides and no cable TV. In other words, totally out of synch with the rest of America.

The Sidebar

I know it will be a crushing blow to many of you who had grown attached to the circa-1974 information about me that has been languishing in the sidebar all year long, but I have at long last done some updating to the site. A couple of changes you'll note:

1. I've killed the Google ads. As fun as they were to watch, they just weren't bringing in enough cash to justify taking up all that real estate.

2. I've put up some initial dates for my book tour, which starts next week with a quick trip to Seattle. I'll blog more about these when we get closer to them.

3. After years of doing lectures based entirely on people writing in and asking me to come talk at their event, I've finally signed on with a lecture agent: American Program Bureau, which represents everyone from Gorbachev to Goldie Hawn. I really like speaking, and always try to craft something new wherever I go. So if you're putting together some kind of conference or event, and are interested in having me come give a little song-and-dance, by all means get in touch with the folks at APB. I guarantee you I'm cheaper than Goldie and Gorbie.

Finally, nice work with the Mind Wide Open links. When I posted the original entry, we were at 70,000 on the Amazon charts, having hit a high of around 5,000. Yesterday we peaked at 1,200, and have been bouncing around that range consistently. And we're still almost three weeks from pub date. So thanks for that. Please do drop a line when you've finished the book -- as soon as I hear from a few of you, I'll open up a thread to discuss it.

Iowa

I was all set to go to bed tonight with the strangely happy thought of a true four-way race for the Democratic nomination: with Kerry and Edwards surging, Clark rising in New Hampshire, and Dean still the pre-emptive frontrunner.

And then, five minutes ago, I saw Dean's concession speech. Um, what was that all about? Was it just me, or did he mention invading Poland in the middle of that litany? Every nagging little thing voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina have heard about this guy being out of control just got amplified a thousandfold.

I haven't seen any of the spin on this, but my gut reaction was: Dean just lost the nomination. For any number of reasons, I hope I'm wrong. But there it is.

The Book, At Last

I'm very happy to report that, while my author copies have not yet arrived at my house, Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com apparently have my new book in stock. This is a good day. If you've been following the blog over the past year, you've been there for the submission of the initial manuscripts, the summer of revision, a few hints and snippets from the work in progress, and an early review or two. Now the fun really begins.

For those of you who missed some of those previous entries, the book is called Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life. Here's the way I described it in an earlier post: "The book is an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual. There are a number of great books that ask questions like: How did the brain evolve? Or: how does the brain work? This book asks a related, but more intimate question: how does your brain work? In what ways can science shed light on your own personality traits, emotional habits, mental blindspots or strengths? In the book I've set myself up as a kind of guinea pig for this experiment: I take a number of tests that evaluate different cognitive faculties; I do a number of explorations with neurofeedback; I help design a series of fMRI experiments on my own head. I also have conversations with some of the world's leading brain scientists, who function as guides through this amazing inner landscape.

In many ways, the tone of the book will be familiar to those of you who read Emergence -- it's popular science with a literary gloss. (One of the sub-themes of the book is the way neuroscience echoes the insights of novelists like Woolf and James.) But there's a new first-person component to this book, something I've never really tried before in print. I talk about how understanding the brain has changed the way that I've experienced a number of personal events: 9/11, the birth of both of our sons, various frightening events, and a few happy ones as well. In a way, I've been developing this first-person voice simultaneously in the book and here on the blog, so I already have you all to thank for putting up with this work-in-progress over the past nine months."

Since I last talked about the early reception of the book, we've had a number of reviews come in, all of them very favorable. Publisher's Weekly said that it "not only gives the reader a gee-whiz glimpse at an emerging field, but also offers a guide for incorporating its new insights into one's own worldview." Popular Science -- which is currently featuring the book on the front door of its web site -- calls it "mind-bending." (In the positive sense of the phrase.) And there's a really nice review in the February issue of Oprah's magazine, which as you can imagine is very exciting given that Oprah is just about the most powerful person in publishing. Much more to come, including some exciting media appearances by yours truly, but it's a great start -- particularly considering the official publication date is still almost a month away.

Now here's the part where I ask for your help. All of you who read this blog -- people who were fans of Emergence, or Interface Culture, or FEED -- you are my posse. You are my tribe. Emergence got some very nice reviews, but it continues to sell largely because of word of mouth -- people giving it to friends, or talking it up on their blogs, etc. So if you're interested in reading the book, and interested in seeing it do well, here are a few things you can do to help.

1. Head over to Amazon (or BarnesandNoble) to buy a copy now. A good online sales rank in the weeks before publication can be a very positive sign for buyers at real-world bookstores, as well as a sign that a book has some energy behind it. Last week, we were about 1.4 million on the Amazon chart; this week we got as high as 5,000. It'd be interesting to see if the blog can drive that number up over the next few days.

2. Go back to Amazon and buy two more copies for your closest friends.

3. If you're a real-world bookstore shopper, stop by and pick up a copy or two, and if they don't have it yet -- please put in an order. Advance orders can also help with the behind-the-scenes industry buzz about a book.

4. If you have a blog, please do help get the word out that the book is available. And if you're reading it, please post your responses, positive and negative. (If you post negative things, I will of course be forced to flood your comments area with spam, but that's your decision.)

5. Come out to see me on the book tour, which will run on and off again from late January to early March. I'll be posting details about my appearances, but I'm going to be doing a number of events in New York, as well as events in D.C., Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Houston, Chapel Hill, and Durham. Perhaps we can coordinate some kind of sbj.com meetup where we all go out for drinks after the reading. Or even before the reading.

6. The last thing you can do to help is really the most important one: enjoy the book, and let me know what you think. I believe this is the best thing that I've done so far, but I also feel strangely vulnerable about the book, because I'm a character in it, and because it talks about my life (and my brain) in ways that I've never tried to do in print before. Taking this tour through the brain sciences has transformed the way that I think about my own life in countless ways. I'll be fascinated to hear if it has the same effect on others.

Internet-Era Democracy

My latest Discover column will be somewhat old hat to those of you who have been following the blog, but I figured I'd point to it anyway. It's more on the Dean campaign, and their use of the Web, making the point that almost all their tools to date have been about organizing people, and not generating ideas. There's been a great explosion of bottom-up techniques, but they've all revolved around political process, not political values. It occurred to me in the last few days, talking to various reporters who have called to talk about Dean and Emergence, that the simplest way to think about this is to imagine what the Dean campaign technology will look like if he's elected. What will the role of the blogs and the meetups be once he's in the White House? That's much less clear -- and in a way, I think it's the most interesting question to ask right now.

Also, don't miss Gary Wolf's piece on Dean from this month's Wired, which comes with a nice little "suggested reading" list for making sense of the campaign.

The War On Terror's Blind Spot

When the Atlanta Olympics bomber was caught last year, I posted the following comment here: "There have been five major U.S.-based terror attacks over the past decade: the Unabomber's campaign; the original WTC attack; Oklahoma City; the Olympic pipe-bomb; and finally 9/11. So if you measure by number of high-profile attacks, and not by body count, it's basically a draw right now: two attacks by right-wing nuts, two by Islamic nuts, and one by a radical Luddite. If two attacks are enough to throw hundreds of innocent civilians with suspicious-sounding names into jail for months, what are Ashcroft and Ridge planning for the far right? Fundraisers perhaps?"

This afternoon, I happened to stumble across this story from the Christian Science Monitor: "Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature." As the article goes on to say, there's been almost no national coverage of the case, and the government hasn't even seen fit to hold a press conference to discuss it. I find this incredibly short-sighted and insane. I mean, we've had headlines all this week where the news is literally that someone with a suspicious-sounding name didn't show up for a flight in France. And here we have an actual arms trove and a borderline WMD found in the possession of someone with clear intent to use it -- someone who was discovered because his box of fake DOD and UN badges was sent to the wrong address -- and it's practically a non-event. If Krar's first name had been Abdul instead of William, you can bet Ashcroft would have been giving press conferences from the scene of the arrest.

Of course, if the Bush administration did crack down on right-wing extremist terrorism the way they cracked down on Bin Laden by invading Iraq, it might be a little tricky politically. What would they do, invade Montana?

My Love Affair With The Genius Bar

Part of being a great consumer technology company is not screwing up the products you sell people. But sometimes the measure of a great company lies in how it deals with the inevitable screw-ups that do occur. On Friday night -- after a day of waiting, literally, at the window for the Airborne Express guy to come -- my Winter Solstice present to myself finally showed up: a new dual processor PowerMac G5. I spend an hour in that blissful, unpacking-my-new-computer mode: plugging everything in, inspecting the design, launching a few built-in apps to marvel at the speed. And then I go to insert a CD to start installing applications, and -- clunk! -- the optical drive won't open. After a little inspection, I determine that it's been installed just a fraction of an inch too high, and so the CD tray is banging into the case when it tries to open.

My mood darkens.

Then I open up the case, and it's clear that the drive has been mounted at a slight angle, causing the front of it to be higher than the opening. But for the life of me I can't pull the thing out to re-mount it. I try wiggling it around for about half an hour to no avail. (An annoying process: wiggle drive, close up box, restart computer, then press eject. Then shut down computer, pull out power, open up box, wiggle drive, etc.) With each failed wiggle, I can see the next week unfold with increasing clarity: I have to wait until Monday to send the box back to Apple, and if I'm lucky, a repaired machine comes back four or five days later. It's an infuriating thought, because I know this is a problem that a technician could probably fix in five minutes, and now I'm going to lose an entire week with my beautiful new machine.

But as it turns out, when I finally call Apple the next day, they say: "Just take it down to the nearest Apple store and they should be able to fix it right there." So I hope into a cab with my 40-pound machine propped up on the seat next to me, and head into the Soho Apple store, and then lug the box up to the Genius Bar. Sure enough, they whisk it away for all of seven minutes, and come back with the drive reinstalled perfectly. No charge, no paperwork, no wait. The trickiest thing about the whole operation was trying to hail a cab in the middle of Soho on a Saturday afternoon with a $2,000 computer in one hand.

Since then everything has been fine. Not just fine, actually -- blazingly fast. With all this horsepower on my desk, I should easily be able to post to the blog twice a week from now on. Maybe even three times.