Steven Johnson at SXSW

I’ve been a fan of Steven Johnson since I first read Interface Culture close to a decade ago; I remember it as one of the most poignant and well written discussions of software – and the relationship between digitalness and humanness – that I’d ever read. It’s still ranks as one of the best articulations of the fleeting quality of designing for behavior; one of my favorite passages describes the elusive quality of the digital realm:

For all the kinesis, the hapless Sonic addict had little control over the onscreen character’s actions: there were really only two options – jump and go faster – and pretty much any combination of those two would produce something interesting on the screen… what made it such a phenomenal success lay in the sheer exhilaration of moving, and moving fast. You didn’t so much play Sonic as ride it.

Steven has moved away from a pure discussion of interaction, and has embraced the notion of design for and with culture. His talk today at SXSW delved deep into what he calls “old growth media” – the thriving forest of evolved news media, adapted to understand and embrace the benefits of a digital platform. He’s dead on, as usual, and while his talk is a sobering description of the death of an industry, it also pointed to a positive way in which that industry could choose to evolve. His core premise is that most of us ride the long tail of news reporting, which our papers just can’t deliver. Niche style blogs have crept up in the two most likely categories – technology and politics – but we’ll soon see a dramatic increase in blog-style reporting about everything from needlepoint to masonry.

He describes the largest objection to this niche style “ecosystem news”; that “it's far more complicated to navigate this than to sit down with your daily paper.” He’s talking about both usability and information management, and he’s right – but he’s also missed a key point, one that we see played out at frog over and over as we tackle convergent design problems. There’s a beautiful poetry to antiquity, to the analog, and to the physical object and tactile experience. Steven described how he used to continually visit a bookstore in Rhode Island when he was “a skinny 19 year old in baggy pants and a Morrissey hairdo”, waiting to get the newest Macworld issue. I remember growing up, playing on the ground at my house in Rochester, door open, sun streaming in, while my parents read the Sunday paper and ate bagels and lox. Our memories are crafted by experiences, and the richest experiences I recall have a multisensory and substantially real – physical – foundation. Until the niche style bloggers can find a way to offer this resonate physical quality, I can’t see it offering the same richness of the old media. Even in a customized, personalized, and direct way, digital news reporting still lacks the human quality of the analog.

I’m glad that Steven was the first talk I saw at SXSW, and I anticipate a strong conference with thought provoking and relevant content. I also anticipate a crazy party tomorrow night, so I hope you’ll come and join us. Rumor has it, there’s a few surprises to come late at night …

Jon Kolko