Steven-Johnson

One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg's printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn't really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways. I love that story because I thought I knew the story of Gutenberg's influence, but it turned out to have this other strand that had never occurred to me.

I know this sounds like I am preaching to the choir, but honestly, sites like Reddit are a great place for that kind of inspiration. For me, I've tried to cultivate a diverse "coffeehouse" of people that I follow on Twitter: writers, scientists, musicians, politicians, etc. They're constantly recommending stories or albums or films that I had no idea I'd be interested in. Those are my "parts on the table."

Probably Ghost Map, because I thought I already knew the story when I sat down to write it: lone genius John Snow makes a map of a cholera epidemic and discovers that the disease is caused by contaminated drinking water. But once I dug into the research, I found out that it was much more complicated, and interesting: Snow had been tinkering with the waterborne theory for years, and he had some very important collaborators who were crucial to the story.

From everywhere! But often from being too locked into a single point of view. That's the beauty of collaborative networks where the participants have different fields of expertise (a big theme of the show and the book, BTW). It's so much harder to get locked into a mistake when you're constantly bouncing ideas of off people. If there is too much similarity in a group, you can get mistakes that emerge from a kind of herd mentality or groupthink. But if you diversify that's not as much of a problem.

I've been following reddit for years, but have never done an AMA before. And also, the site we created fourteen years ago, Plastic.com, was very similar to Reddit in many ways, so the format is something I've always loved.