How We Got to Now

Steven 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 outside.in. 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.

His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age was released in September 2012. In August 2013, PBS announced that Johnson would be the host and co-creator of a new six-part series on the history of innovation, How We Got to Now, scheduled to air on PBS and BBC Two in Fall 2014.

This talk is also part of Image as Location , a symposium to discuss and visualize how images define location and allow us to access the inaccessible. Image as Location forms part of a festival of exhibitions and workshops throughout the Bay Area, hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy of the United States, the Goethe Institut, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and swissnex San Francisco.