stevenberlinjohnson.com

America's Bloggiest Neighborhoods

Big day at outside.in today: we've launched a completely new design for the site, created by our awesome new in-house designer, Doria Fan. My colleague John Geraci has a great survey of all the the process and issues that went into the design -- it's a classic story of starting out trying to solve one very specific problem and ultimately doing something much more ambitious, but also ditching the original objective that started the whole process in the first place.

We've also just announced a list that I've been wanting to compile ever since we first came up with the idea for the site: America's Bloggiest Neighborhoods. It's a pretty fun little sociological experiment -- turns out placebloggers are thriving in gentrifying neighborhoods. Makes sense, but it was a surprise to us until we actually ran the numbers.

I have no idea whether this story is actually valid, but if it does turn out that Cho Seung Hui had no violent games among his possessions, do you think the media will investigate the theory that exposure to fantasy violence helps prevent real-world violence, by providing an outlet for aggression with no actual consequences? Somehow I doubt it.

(Of course, as I argued at the end of Everything Bad, it's pointless either way to argue these things from individual cases. The much more relevant point is that teen violence had an unprecedent drop across the country just as the games were getting much more explicitly violent in the late 90s and early part of this decade. That still doesn't mean there's a correlation either way, but it does suggest, to me at least, that we don't have to panic about the impact of screen violence.)

Large Is Smart

Jason pointed me to this amazing-sounding study on the whole metaphor of cities as biological organisms. Key graph from the coverage is this:

What they found were some general correlations of size and resource consumption that more or less fit the biological organism metaphor, meaning as the city grew in size it required less energy (resources) to sustain it in a proportion called sublinear scaling. What was surprising to the team was when they measured creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew, the scaling of this output was not sublinear, but superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.

Long Zoom Interview

PopMatters is running a long interview with me about my various books and projects, conducted by the excellent Jason Jones. One of the things that's great about this kind of conversation -- particularly when it's with someone as smart as Jason, and someone who has read your work closely -- is that you discover all sorts of things about your own work that you wouldn't have otherwise. Jason has a question here about the absence of Foucault -- one of my college idols -- in Ghost Map which I'm still mulling over.

But the most hilarious discovery for me comes at the very end of the interview. When I was writing my "Long Zoom" article about Spore for the Times Magazine, I had a vague suspicion that I'd used the phrase in a FEED article in sometime around 1999-2000. I searched through the FEED articles I have on my local hard drive -- I know, I know, I'm an idiot for not having the full FEED archives online -- but never found it. But then I read Jason's interview, and it begins with this quote from the closing pages of Emergence:

Imagine a kind of conceptual tracking shot of life two or three years from now, a movement from scale to scale—like the wonderful Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten... Only in our long zoom do we find, at each scale, the same behavior repeating itself again and again.

I think this is what happens when you've written five or more books on very different topics. It gets hard enough just keeping track of your own ideas, much less other people's.