Steven Johnson on Newspapers, Gladwell, and the Why of What Happens

You've been popularizing a different way of looking at things, moving beyond metaphoric descriptions and into systemic perspectives. Where'd that come from?

With Everything Bad Is Good for You, I was marking this change that had been slowly happening in my head over ten of fifteen years. I spent a lot of time thinking about popular culture and media when I was in college and grad school and wrote a million papers, and the dominant way that you wrote about media and culture or society, if you wanted to make that connection, was that it was a kind of representation: There was something happening in society, and this issue was being reenacted on some levels in these novels or televison shows.

That’s kind of an old Marxist, literary criticism way of looking at the world: the class struggle is the real thing, so you need to read the novel or play as if it’s dramatizing that struggle. But I realized by the time that I got to write Everything Bad Is Good for You is that it wasn’t a representational problem, it was a causal problem. You could see these changes in society that made a kind of narrative or storytelling strategy possible, and it wasn’t reenacting anything, it was a direct cause of it. There was a system that was producing a new form as an output.

So then I was talking about the question of why pop culture was getting more formally complex, and one reason is that it suddenly became possible to watch television shows multiple times. It wasn’t possible when I was growing up—there were economic and technological reasons involved in that—but now there’s a reason to create things you can watch multiple times. So in this new system, you get a mega-hit show like Lost, that is unbelievable complicated. If you did a diagram of Lost and compared it to Ulysses, you’d probably have a one-to-one ratio of the number of elements.

That’s a more interesting way of thinking about it, and that approach is in The Invention of Air, too. Why was Priestley able to be so innovative? To answer that question you have to see his life as a system of forces that operate on all these scales. Part of it is his genius, but so much is this other, systemic stuff. People have mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell and I are a little bit parallel in this, that Outliers is talking about similar things in the same way. It’s true of all our books, we have similar interests, and we’re running in parallel with each other—except for the part where he sells 20 million books and I sell…not as much.

You've been called a cultural critic. How do you respond to that?

It sounds like that old kind of criticism. When you think about the issue of specialization and Priestley’s life and interests, in a vastly smaller way, with less accomplishment, I’m trying to do the same kind of balancing act in my life. I wrote a book called Interface Culture and a book called Emergence, and they were both kind of media theory books. There was a fork in my life where I could have said—I’ve built a little reputation for myself with these books, I'll become someone who writes books about the future of media.

If you do that, it’s great, you then become an incredible expert on this problem and you understand every little detail of it. Whenever someone needs someone to talk about it, you’re the guy. But for whatever reason, I looked around and thought, “In 1995 there weren’t that many people writing about technology and media in this way, and now there are a lot of us, so they don’t need me.”

So wrote a book about neuroscience because I thought there was a need for that kind of book, and then I wrote Everything Bad, which got me into the cultural critic business a little bit. I jumped into this contentious argument, and got a lot of attention, and I felt like I needed to do something totally different so I didn’t get caught in a rut. One of the things so appealing about writing about a 19th-century cholera epidemic is that it was so far away from cultural criticism—it’s an eclectic history.

It’s funny, when I was in college I thought, “I’m going to write books where people aren’t going to be sure where to find them in the bookstore.” Sociology? Media Theory? Which is kind of what I ended up doing. But when I got to having books in bookstores, I realized that’s a stupid idea. No one knows where to find your books! People call me a popular science writer, and that’s probably the best way to describe me.

One of the things I always strive for with a book is that it be the kind of book where you read it, you put it down, and then you walk around for a couple of days with the book in your head, trying to fit everything in. It should mess with you a little bit. I spend a lot of time thinking about where the reader is—I have this elaborate technique of limiting the number of times I read the book while writing it. The biggest problem is to keep rereading and rereading and you get so sick of your material you can’t tell what’s working and what’s not.

So I’ll write a couple of pages, close it down for the day, and when I pick it up the next morning, I won’t reread it. I’ll just figure out where I was and start again. When I finish a chapter, I’ll really only have read it once. Then I read it fresh, and then I put it away and don’t reread it for a long period of time. It lets me get into the reader’s mental state, and then you can sense, “Oh, I’m really liking this, it’s pulling me in,” or, “I’m confused, he’s going too fast.” A book that anticipates your needs as a reader, that is the book that sticks in your head. As a craft goal, that’s what I always try to do.

And yet, some people--say, New York Times book reviewers--are not going to be happy with your "long zoom" approach. They want a biography like mom used to make.

That was one of the first reviews we got, so I had a moment of, “Is this not going to work? Is this approach going to irritate people?” Ghost Map got great reviews, almost across the board. So I was worried I misjudged how well integrated the macro-level theory questions were with the story. I thought I had a pretty good balance, I’d worked a lot on that. But that’s been the only review like that we’ve had—that was an outlier, as Gladwell would say. Someone said it was like someone reviewing a soccer game and criticizing it because it wasn’t like baseball.

When you write books and you try something different, you’re going to get a bad review now and again. If the New York Times gives you a half-page review with a picture of the book, I don’t care—“You spelled my name right, the second half was nice, I’ll take it.” To me, it gets down the to question of, “Do you want to know what happened, or what happened and why?” If you’re interested in why it happened, then I’ll stand behind the approach the books takes.

It’s not sufficient to explain either the spirit of the age or put it as class struggle, but you have to also talk about the technology of the day and what it enabled. You have to talk about the information network that that technology enabled. I mean, without the postal system—think how many things would have turned out differently if there hadn’t been a mail system—both in enabling them to communicate and also to have their letters misplaced or stolen. And you have to tell the story of energy. You can’t not think about that if you’re thinking about big changes in society. Most people seem to be energized by the approach—“It’s so exciting to hear history written this way.”