1Startclub Blogs

One of the key things to the story is that I am a dropout from grad school in English literature. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and then I went to Columbia for grad school, where I was working on the nineteenth-century novel. I spent my early twenties sitting around reading Dickens, George Eliot, and Balzac and Flaubert, and a little bit of American literature.

At the same time, the computer world was starting to explode. The Internet was starting to appear, and some of these games were coming out: SimCity, the first iteration of that, came out in 1989.

I was following the world of humanities and at the same time the computer world. To use your phrasing, I became Steven Johnson around 1995, when the Web first appeared. I realized that those two worlds could live together in a beautiful, intellectual way.

I started putting together the idea for my first book, Interface Culture, which was about the world of computer interfaces and the world of culture. At the same time I started on Feed, which was the first general-interest Web magazine before Salon or Slate came along.

I dropped out of grad school I did everything but my dissertation and went off and started writing about these things. One of the underlying drives for all this was to write about the technological world through the lens of the cultural critic.