stevenberlinjohnson.com

Amazing story about how the Bush Administration won't remove a creationist account of the Grand Canyon from the Park Service bookstore there. (It turns out the Grand Canyon may have been created by Noah's Flood. Who knew?) But I just love this line:

“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan,” Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book.

Financial Times

I had missed this review of Ghost Map from a few weeks back in the Financial Times. I love the opening:

I wonder how Steven Johnson pitched this book to his agent. Maybe he said something like this: "I want to describe how the cause of cholera was discovered in London in 1854 and how it made possible the enormous cities of today. I plan to write a lot about excrement, sewers and how horrible it is to die as your body suddenly expels litres of water and waste." Mmmm, nice. You need a strong digestion to get through the resulting book, The Ghost Map. If your stomach is up to it, your brain will benefit. The story of how John Snow, a London physician, proved that cholera came from drinking infected water, not from breathing noxious air, has been told repeatedly, but never with such intellectual dexterity and, despite the topic, so engagingly.

A number of people have made similar remarks about the topic itself being initially very repulsive. It's always meant in a flattering way: this guy actually makes cholera into a great airplane read. And so I'd love to be able to say that I took on a deliberately challenging topic and in spite of everything managed to turn it into a page turner. But the truth is from the beginning I thought of this material as distinctly commercial. Books about disease have historically done very well -- think Hot Zone or Influenza or even, in part, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It was really only when I started doing more of the research in London and realized how central human excrement was going to be to the story that I began to wonder if people were going to be grossed out in a bad way. It was right around then that On Bullshit had become a surprise bestseller, and so I joking said to my editor one day that perhaps we should call it On Shit.

Happy Winter Solstice!

I may be a day late with this, but happy solstice, everyone -- it's my favorite holiday of the year, secularist that I am. Normally, I'd say something about keeping hope alive through the darkened cold of a Northeast winter, but it's been like 60 degrees here every other day.

Speaking of secular holidays, the one I think we should start celebrating now that we have access to long-term meteorological data is the true midwinter's eve: the point in the calendar where the average temperatures hit their low for the year. It's somewhere around a month from now (just as the high point of summer heat arrives a month after the summer solstice.) Or at least it is for NYC -- I wonder if that pacing varies in different parts of the world. (Presumably landlocked areas might have a slightly different schedule.)

Anyhow, the point is: have a great holiday. Thanks for hanging out here this year.

It's All About You

No doubt you've already seen that Time Magazine has cleverly named "you" as "Person Of The Year." They'd asked me a few weeks ago to write an essay for the issue about the rise of amateurism online and my own experiences with outside.in, and in asking, they mentioned that Web 2.0 was a candidate for the cover. They've chosen non-people before -- the computer was "machine of the year" in 1982, but as I was writing this piece, I kept thinking that putting Web 2.0 on the cover was going to be a little odd, almost like nominating "B2B Enterprise Solutions" in 2000. The way they've done it is much more elegant, and the mirrored covers are pretty sly too. I'm pleased to have my little essay in there as well:

If you read through the arguments and Op-Eds over the past few years about the impact of Web amateurism, you'll find that the debate keeps cycling back to two refrains: the impact of blogging on traditional journalism and the impact of Wikipedia on traditional scholarship. In both cases, a trained, institutionally accredited elite has been challenged by what the blogger Glenn Reynolds called an "army of Davids," with much triumphalism, derision and defensiveness on both sides.

This is a perfectly legitimate debate to have, since bloggers and Wikipedians are likely to do some things better than their professional equivalents and some things much worse, and we may as well figure out which is which. The problem with spending so much time hashing out these issues is that it overstates the importance of amateur journalism and encyclopedia authoring in the vast marketplace of ideas that the Web has opened up. The fact is that most user-created content on the Web is not challenging the authority of a traditional expert. It's working in a zone where there are no experts or where the users themselves are the experts...

Added 12/21: A friend writes in with these wise words:

The format of blogging - the actual interactive design part of it where feedback posts are possible, (and this goes for the wiki nature of wikipedia too I guess) is that it's self correcting and precipitates over a period of time.

So there is a wisdom of crowds kind of Emergent nature to it - - i.e., a piece in a newspaper or magazine is a finite piece with clear limits that exists in a moment (or an hour) in time - - however long it takes to read it. A blog, with its self correcting counter posts and track backs gets at the information in a "process" that the readers participate in. the ultimate truth of it, or actual thesis of what's said "happens" over a period of time and with the self correcting help of the interactive, collective responses....

I get and agree with the spirit of "it's You". But in a way they had it wrong. It's us. (though that's what they meant). Still, if they had actually said "Us", it would have made the Web 2.0 concept instantly clearer to the many who've never heard of it.

Denise Caruso's Intervention

When I first met Denise Caruso over ten years ago, she was writing the Digital Commerce column for the New York Times and running the influential Spotlight conference. At a time of great hype about all things digital, Denise offered a unique mix of intelligent skepticism and genuine long-term vision. (If you go back and read those Digital Commerce columns in the Times archives, you’ll see what I mean -- there was no one writing about the tech scene the way Denise was back then.) She then went on to explore a theme that’s also been central to my work -- interdisciplinary thinking -- by founding the Hybrid Vigor Institute, where she began exploring the question of risk assessment in times of immense scientific and technological change. That research led her to write her powerful and essential new book, Intervention: Confronting The Real Risks of Genetic Engineering And Life On A Biotech Planet.

Intervention takes as its primary case study the sorry state of real debate -- in the U.S. at least -- over the long-term implications of genetic engineering. As Denise writes, “We’re more than just ‘too far down the road’ with transgenic technologies. I’m not sure we even know what road we’re on; we’re driving too fast to read the signs.” But as crucial an issue as, say, genetically modified food is, Intervention is wrestling with an even more profound question: how we measure and anticipate risk with such complex, open-ended technologies. Denise makes it clear how “spectacularly nearsighted” we tend to be when evaluating radical new advances. And when we’re meddling with the primary forces of nature -- to quote Ned Beatty’s speech from Network -- we can’t afford to be nearsighted. Fortunately, we have people like Denise Caruso to improve our vision.

International

Yesterday was a fun, if slightly surreal and exhausting, day. It began with me taping two of the best radio programs in the UK: Start The Week and Nightwaves, both of which seemed to go very well. I then raced around London doing another three or four interviews, all of which were entertaining in different ways. Meanwhile, over in the US, the New York Times was running a profile of me in the Arts section, talking about Ghost Map and Outside.in, and my general pattern of developing ideas with both books and web sites. (I should mention that two of my old sites, Plastic and FEED, like outside.in, were very much collaborations -- the article makes it sound a bit like I created them entirely on my own.) It was very odd to have big article and picture running in the Times, and yet be in London for the entire day. After all, the whole point of having your picture in the Times is to ride the subways all day looking for people reading that part of the paper, and then position yourself directly across from them, so when they look up... I'm kidding -- I don't really do that. But I think about doing it...

Anyhow, the day in London ended with an amazingly fun conversation with Brian Eno that seemed to fly by in about 5 minutes. A podcast version is coming, I'm told, but in the meantime, you can see from these pictures that we attempted to do some kind of elaborate mind control experiment with the audience, entirely using hand gestures.

Walking London's Bridges

Got into London in a driving rainstorm at around 6 AM this morning, but by the time I woke up in my hotel room, around noon, it was a lovely early winter day here: a brisk wind, but absolutely crystal clear skies, and everybody out doing their holiday shopping. I always try to take a walk across the river when I'm here -- just to take stock of what's changed -- and today I walked the newish Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridges for the first time. It occured to me that a pedestrian bridge over a river in a city center is one of the great, sacred urban experiences: you're in the middle of everything, and yet weirdly removed at the same time. (I suspect the High Line will have some of this feeling, even without the river.) Incredible number of cranes visible in The City proper, which was interesting to see after reading over lunch in the Sunday Times how London has replaced NYC as the finance capital of the world. What's more, it was just around dusk here, and there was a full moon hanging over the river as well. I took a snap with the camera phone when I got back to my hotel, but of course it doesn't capture it at all. Still, it's the view from my window.