Steven Johnson (author)

112
Steven Johnson (author) bigraphy, stories - American journalist

Steven Johnson (author) : biography

June 6, 1968 –

Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist.

Education

Steven Johnson attended St. Albans School as a youth. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, at edge.orgPogrebin, Robin. New York Times" (December 4, 2006) a part of Brown’s modern culture and media department., Brown University web page. He also has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature.

Career

Johnson is the author of eight books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. He has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site . A contributing editor to Wired, he writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and many other periodicals. Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Medium, Atavist, Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Patch.com.

He is the author of the best-selling book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts such as television dramas and video games have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills.

His recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From, advances the notion that innovative thinking is a slow and gradual process based on the concept of the "slow hunch" rather than an instant moment of inspiration. He expostulates on the concept of the "adjacent possible" which enables the thinker to develop uncharted insights into unexplored areas.

His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age was released in September 2012.

Personal life

Steven Johnson is married and has three sons. He lives with his family in Marin County, California.

Awards and honors

Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year’s best books by The Economist. His book The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly, and was runner up for the National Academies Communication award in 2006. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Johnson was the 2009 Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence at Columbia Journalism School, and served for several years as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Journalism School. He won a Newhouse School Mirror Award for his TIME magazine cover article "." He has appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Colbert Report, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.