And we're done!
schtengraby2 says:
You talked about making a board game with your kid on Start the Week this morning. Sounded fun! How did you go about doing that?
Guardian contributor That was really an incredibly rewarding experience as a parent. (And I think it was rewarding for my son too.) It was a summer-long project. We spent some time sketching out some ideas about what the theme of the game should be, which turned out to be a game about growing vegetables. And then spent much more time sketching out the actual board, just using paper and magic markers, and devising the rules. And then we would, in the language of product design, iterate: we'd play a couple of games, discuss what was working and wasn't working, and then tweak the game in a way we thought would make it more fun. And then we'd start the whole process again. I wrote a longer description of the whole process, with some reflections on game design as an educational tool and a great family experience, in this article at our site How We Get to Next.
Christopher SJ Ong says:
Steven, with all the developments in technology in recent years - especially the iPhone - an update or sequel to your great first book INTERFACE CULTURE is long overdue. Please?
Guardian contributor Well, that is very kind of you to say. Interface Culture is by a wide margin the most obscure of all my books, in terms of just the number of people who read it, so it's always nice to hear a shout out to the book from a fan. I wrote it so long ago I'm not sure myself what was in that book! So I'll take your word for it, that an update would be useful. But interestingly, the book I find myself actively wanting to write a version 2.0 of is my second book, Emergence, which was all about self-organising systems and distributed networks, and had a few hints at the end about what these kinds of systems would mean for politics and for society more generally. I wrote that book when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, and I think I had stumbled across something that was important then, but is even more important now, given everything that has happened with networks since I wrote it. And while I'm very proud of that book, part of me feels like I was just a little bit too young to write it, and now that I'm a middle-aged man, I have a lot more wisdom than 30-year-old Steven did. And so it would be worth revisiting. Someday I might find the time to do that.
With Interface Culture, one of the reasons I feel less inclined to update it is at the time I was trying to do something that was really not that common, which was write about new technologies and particularly software interfaces, in terms of their broader cultural impact, on everything from art to politics. In the mid-90s when I was writing that book, this was not a particularly widespread practice; most people wrote about technology as product reviews ("I give this new version of Microsoft Word three and a half mice!") so I was, in writing Interface Culture – and I was not the only person writing this way but there were a lot less of us – trying to make the case that software had to be conceptualised through a much wider lens. Now, that kind of critical approach– the idea that small changes in software interfaces might have massive effects on, say, presidential elections – is much more familiar. And so I feel sometimes less of a need to write in that mode. And that's a good thing; I'm happy that there are lots of people writing and thinking that way.
By the way, I should add, that the first real publication that ever paid me to write in this way back in the 90s was the Guardian. I wrote a kind of column for what was called the online section, that Rusbridger did before he became editor - I met him in 1994, and I had an Apple Newton. I basically nerded out with Rusbridger showing him this device and he said - would you like to write a column about technology from America? And I said: that sounds like a great idea!
usefulmirage asks:
What’s your highest character level in Skyrim? Or are you more a Fallout guy?
Guardian contributor Sad to say, my great videogame love was always, and continues to be, Sim City. I continue to think that simulation games like Sim City are amazingly entertaining and also tremendous intellectual exercises: trying to manage a complex system with thousands of interacting variables, setting your own goals for what kind of world you want to build, and in some cases interacting with other people in the virtual world. That's a very rich form of cognition, and also one that happens to be increasingly valuable in the real world. I think it would be fascinating if classrooms used more historical simulations to engage the kids with the sense of what different periods and cultures were like – learning through playing, in a sense. Imagine a history class that taught the American revolution in the form of a Sim City-style game where you recreated the entire political and economic and military history of that period with all the students playing different roles. The kids would run to class every morning, and they would end up with a more nuanced and lasting sense of the true forces at work during that period, than they would get from reading a narrative account of it or listening to a lecture. Of course, with simulations, sometimes you play out the American revolution and the British would win, so you have to connect the kids back to the actual history - it can't be all games. But the power of those simulations is something I think schools should be experimenting more with.
In terms of more contemporary games, my main engagement with them is in telling my teenage sons that it's time to stop playing, because they've been on the Playstation for the past five hours. They have gotten wind that their father wrote a book called Everything Bad is Good for You, defending videogames. But unfortunately they're too hooked on the games to bother reading it.
Alderbaran says:
In your series ‘How We Got to Now’, you were able to connect a myriad of events in such a way as to create genuinely new insights into familiar stories and everyday items (A great series!) Do you think that children taught within the constraints of narrow school curriculums risk losing the ability to think in flexible and original ways.
Guardian contributor First off, thank you, I'm so glad you liked the show. I think about the education question a lot, and in fact one of the things that I've been most proud of How We Got to Now is that it has been adopted in a lot of school curricula precisely because it has that connective, multidisciplinary approach to making sense of the world. I give a lot of talks at schools, particularly undergraduate liberal arts colleges, and whenever I do, I always make a point of telling the students that, for many of them, this is their last great opportunity to think and study in a truly multidisciplinary way, that everything after they graduate will try to specialise them, make them focus their mind on a single field or discipline – whereas in college there's this wonderful opportunity not just to bounce back and forth between physics and 18th century poetry and 20th century history, but to also make connections between those different fields. That's what I've always tried to do in my books, and in the TV show. And it's a kind of intellectual skill that's increasingly important, because the big problems we face – like climate change – are problems that can't be solved from within the world view of a single discipline. You have to be able to build bridges.
Valdarez asks:
What is the largest animal you think you could kill with your bare hands?
Guardian contributor
Dave Thorpe, asking the big questions:
Do mice find humans hilarious?
Guardian contributor No, but the mice do enjoy conducting experiments on the humans by subtly manipulating their own behaviour in mice-based lab experiments.
pter1960 says:
I do hope you are saying the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing Eve and The Witcher have actually been good for me and that frustrated unshaven thing I see every morning in the mirror is an illusion !
More seriously, what is your take on sustainability and climate change?
Guardian contributor I think the success of Steve Bannon makes it clear that frustrated, unshaven things are doing better than ever.
In terms of sustainability and climate change, as depressing as the current administration is on these issues in the US, I do think we are making a tremendous amount of progress in terms of both electric vehicles and solar power. And I continue to believe that five years from now, the economic argument for a gas powered automobile is going to be very hard to make. Just based on the trends in battery storage technology. And I think it's one of the places where it's important to remember, despite all the criticism that Silicon Valley gets for giving us mindless social media distractions and other timewasting apps, that they have in many ways been leading the charge in terms of new technologies that will help us with climate change (obviously Tesla is a great example of this).
The other thing to look at is the companies themselves that aren't in the energy business per se, but the commitment they've made in recent years to sustainable practices. Both Google and Apple have been leaders in this of late.
Updated
timenrightnz wants to know:
Why doesn’t Trump realise how dumb and dishonest he comes across as?
Guardian contributor The question that has been puzzling me about Trump is for someone who is clearly so emotionally dependent on being well-liked and popular, why he continues to be so attached to supporting what are statistically speaking unpopular positions, given the current American political landscape. I keep waiting for him to wake up one day, and realise that Bannon and Miller have been feeding him a bunch of political positions that are not in the mainstream of the American electorate. But this is one of the things that is so frustrating about the administration's lack of interest in actual facts; when every negative poll is literally dismissed by the president as "FAKE NEWS", there's no feedback mechanism to suggest that perhaps the ship of state should be steered in another direction. It's literally like steering a ship towards the rocks and saying "FAKE ROCKS!"
Alderbaran asks:
With the proliferation of mobile devices and the ease with which information or entertainment can be conjured, are we as a society losing our ability to think critically or do you have a more positive view of this ‘hyper connectivity’?
Guardian contributor I think the very strange and sometimes counterintuitive quality that we have to keep straight in our heads about the internet, and everything that's been built on top like social media, is that the internet has a tendency to amplify whatever we bring to it. If you are interested in spreading fake news, the internet is a great tool for you! If you are interested in sharing a nuanced idea about the political landscape with colleagues and peers all over the world, the internet is a great tool for you as well. If you're interested in being in a bubble, Facebook is fantastic for that. If you're interested in having a diverse set of eclectic influences, Twitter is fantastic for that. Unlike other forms of media before it, the internet, in part because it's based on software is more of a shapeshifter and less predictable in the way that it skews or biases the society that grows up around it. So I don't know where that leaves me in terms of critical thinking or the pursuit of truth; it partially comes down to whether you think the world is populated with more people who are interested in truth than are interested in fake news. That was always the encouraging lesson about Wikipedia, that it would over time trend towards more and more accurate entries because most of the people contributing to it had a basic interest in it being accurate. But recent political events, not to mention the president of the US, suggest that there are more people who are, to put it gently, agnostic about truth than I previously realised...
CarlBr0wn also asks:
Everyone is talking up VR - but is there another innovation that’s going to really change storytelling and the entertainment industry?
Guardian contributor With VR, it's interesting to think about the connection between storytelling and VR. I actually wrote an adaptation of one of the chapters from Wonderland – a chapter that looked at the history of entertainments based on illusions, like the magic lantern – that tried to wrestle with what those earlier forms of illusion could tell us about emerging entertainments like VR. And what I ended up arguing is that storytelling may turn out to be less important to virtual reality in the same way that storytelling was not terribly important to the illusion shows of the early 19th century. If you go back and look at something like the Phantasmagoria or the Panorama, what you see is they were really all about immersive spaces and experiences that transported you to a different world but they weren't really narrative in nature – in other words, you didn't care about believable characters or follow the trajectory of their lives. I suspect that VR may turn out to be similar in that the medium is about dropping you into an alternate world, but not so much about following a plot.
CarlBr0wn asks:
What was the most surprising thing that you found when researching your new book?
Guardian contributor Honestly, the most surprising thing was how rich the topic turned out to be. There were a million little anecdotes I hadn't realised going in to it. When I started out writing the book the premise was that it was going to be worthwhile historically to look at leisure and play, as these experiences are part of modern life and we should know where they came from. But as I dove in to the material in the research phase I began to realise that what was really fascinating was that how much of the "straight" world of history had been shaped by these playful experiences. For instance, there's a major theme in the book about the connection between musical instruments and digital computers and programming. That was a great surprise to me; I'd always heard the story about computers emerging from military technology, but they have deep roots in music as well.
Updated
MelissaLong has a few questions:
Can the innovations in leisure that you’ve researched have applications in the really pressing matters of the day, ie wealth inequality, climate change, political anger etc etc?
Guardian contributor 2. I didn't actually write about humour and comedy in Wonderland, but it could have easily been its own chapter. I think that comedy is one of those places where there is real potential for effectively focusing our political anger and effecting genuine change. I wrote a piece last week for the Guardian that argues that comedy and satire might be more important at this particular moment in the States, than at any other moment in American history. Just think about the impact that SNL seems to have on Trump himself, and all of the online memes about the Bowling Green massacre, and alternative facts.
The other thing that's worth exploring is the role of games as a tool for advancing more serious causes. There are a bunch of explorations of politically or climate-related games designed to expand people's awareness or get them more engaged: Games for Change, or Serious Games, are great early experiments in this.
MelissaLong says:
Your book Future Perfect had the idea that people can organise over networks to get things done. What does this mean in the age of fake news and competing messages? Can we organise to keep the worst of the Trump administration at bay?
Guardian contributor 1. I think the events of the last six months have definitely been discouraging to someone like me have been discouraging to me, who is an optimist about networks. The 2016 election was one of the first times when the internet and social media played a regressive role rather than a progressive one. However, we've already seen in the first few weeks of the "resistance", and things like the women's march and the airport protest, that online networks can be a tremendously powerful tool for fighting back. I think they've been very effective in framing some of the early problems with the Trump administration, kind of cementing a vision of what they've been doing wrong, that goes beyond simple echo chambers.
OleksandrOK starts us off:
What is your most visited website? Thanks.
Guardian contributor It's not always a website, but Twitter is my default starting place online. I've curated an eclectic mix of about 150 that I follow, and I find it an extraordinary source of commentary and humour that is always surprising me. It's been such a valuable resource for me over the years, that I will forgive it for creating Donald Trump. There a guy Matt Yglesias who writes for Vox, a great political writer - definitely one the best on Twitter. But the things I follow are a really diverse bunch: politicians, musicians, tech writers... it's that diversity that makes it such a serendipity engine.
Steven is here to answer your questions
Post your questions for Steven in the comments below - he’s with us for the next hour.
Post your questions for Steven Johnson
At best, video games, pop music and blockbuster movies are seen as the guilty pleasures of low culture – at worst denigrated as pointless trash. But they have a champion in popular science writer Steven Johnson.
His 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for You argued how the complexity of TV drama plots and the interactivity of video games could enhance your brain; his new book Wonderland shows how the leisure industry has triggered technological innovation. In between, he’s written books on everything from cholera epidemics to the discovery of oxygen, co-created three startups, presented the BBC TV series How We Got to Now, and became a contributing editor at Wired.
With Wonderland out this month, he’s joining us to answer your questions, in a live webchat from 1.30pm GMT on Monday 13 February – post them in the comments below, and he’ll take on as many as possible.
Updated
Thanks everyone for the great questions - I hope you'll get a chance to check out Wonderland, my new book. We didn't get to talk about it all that much, but I would like to just mention that the Observer yesterday called it "seductively erudite", a phrase that I am now going to put on my tombstone. Signing off!