Can you summarise the concept of 'outside.in'?

Steven Johnson: We try to organise as much information as possible that we can find on the Web, which is related to neighbourhoods and communities. There are all these things out there, whether it is local bloggers, pieces about the new restaurant opened round the corner, a local school, or a playground that is opening; whether it is local newspapers, an article about high-profile crime, a political campaign, or the city government releasing new information.


There is no easy way to discover and explore all that information geographically. So our mission is a service where you can go in and say, "Okay, I'm living in this neighbourhood", or "I'm standing on this street corner right here; show all the different kinds of news and conversation about the world right around me in terms of physical space". Google is incredible, but it does not do that yet.

How is the service progressing since its start?

Steven Johnson: We have seen that the number of people using the service over the last six months has increased from 20,000 to about 400,000, so the growth rate is great. We are finding that it works really well in dense and connected urban areas. We are based in Brooklyn, New York, where there is a strong community, a lot of local bloggers, plenty of information, and lots of things happening. We are trying to figure out now how to cover the suburbs and more rural areas as well. We are still US based, but we are going to start becoming more and more international over the next year.

You have published five books in the last ten years that link literature with technology in a very thoughtful way. When did your passion for technology start?

Steven Johnson: There are two things linked here. When I went to college in 1986, I bought one of the second-generation Macintosh computers, which I just totally fell in love with. Also, in college I was doing media studies, and I became very interested in the possibility of new forms of media using the screen as an interface. When the Web came along, I was in my twenties, and the very first time that I looked at it, I saw the world was going to change because of it. So I have really been prepared to work with the Internet from its early stage.

Are not you afraid of an abrupt cultural change, worldwide, with technology developing so rapidly?

Steven Johnson: If you look at the Web from 1995 to something like YouTube, and you think just about what is happening on the screen in terms of your options of interacting with it, there is a far bigger change than there was from radio to television. There were no images, sound, real participation, ranking, or sharing on the Web… What it is extraordinary, and this is part of my argument for why younger generations have developed skills that we underestimated, is how fast all this has been assimilated.

But the question of where we are going with all this, and if we are always making the right choices on the way technology is developing, the answer is probably that it is a mix. There is more spam and offensive material than ever before because of the way eMail was designed 25 years ago, and that has spread all over the world. But most of us, I think, probably say, "Yeah, but I would still rather have eMail". It would be better to have a better version, but we do not have that option.

How much of science divulgation, journalism, sociology, literature, and fiction is there in your books?

Steven Johnson: It varies in each book. The Ghost Map, the last one, is built into the true story about the cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s. There is popular science describing how cholera worked and how the bacterium spread through the population. There is also a lot of sociological work about the London of that period and also cultural work on how to represent it. There is also a futuristic view on technology that links directly with the concept of 'outside.in' in terms of how communities, cities, countries, and the world will be organised. Of the five books, this is probably the most purely cross-disciplinary.