There is not an obvious connection between the outbreak of cholera in an overcrowded London neighborhood in 1854 and a Web site that shows the latest Ethiopian restaurant in your ZIP code.
But for Steven Johnson the link is perfectly logical.
In his recent book, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World, Johnson explains how the mystery behind the rapid spread of disease in the Golden Square area of London was solved, largely by a local clergyman, Henry Whitehead, and a doctor, John Snow.
Through Whitehead's knowledge of the residents and Snow's maps connecting the location of cholera deaths with street pumps in the neighborhood, the disease was ultimately traced to a sick baby's diapers that contaminated a well on Broad Street.
Johnson, 38, brings this same street-level awareness to his latest Web site, outside.in, which collects and displays information based on ZIP codes, from a real-estate open house to a police report to a parent's impassioned opinion of a neighborhood school.
"Intuitively, we make a huge number of decisions about what's relevant to us based on geography," Johnson said during a recent interview in his home office in Brooklyn.
"All the time we think about, `I'm interested in this restaurant or this school or this park because it's near me.' But the Web traditionally has not been organized around geography. It's been organized around information space," he said.
Johnson did not start writing The Ghost Map with a related Web site in mind; outside.in took shape as he was finishing the book. Nor is this the first time he has developed Web sites linked -- in his own mind at least -- to books he was writing.
While working on Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software Johnson developed plastic.com, a Web site where people could discuss pop culture, politics and technology; it became among the first sites to feature content generated by users.
His book Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, coincided with his Web site, Feed, which offered news and commentary. Plastic is still online, but Feed is not.
Johnson's other books are Everything Bad is Good For You, and Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.
He also teaches at New York University's journalism school, has written for Wired, Discover and the New York Times magazine and is currently spending a month writing for TimesSelect, an online commentary service of the Times.
In The Ghost Map Johnson makes an explicit connection between the subject of the book and the Internet.
"The influence of the Broad Street maps extends beyond the realm of disease," he writes.
"The Web is teeming with new forms of amateur cartography, thanks to services like Google Earth and Yahoo Maps. Where Snow inscribed the location of pumps and cholera fatalities over the street grid, today's mapmakers record a different kind of data: good public schools, Chinese takeout places, playgrounds, gay-friendly bars and open houses. All the local knowledge that so often remains trapped in the minds of neighborhood residents can now be translated into map form and shared with the rest of the world," he writes.
Outside.in -- which Johnson started with John Geraci and his founding partners Andrew Karsch, Mark Bailey and John Seely Brown -- was largely inspired by Johnson's move from Greenwich Village to Park Slope in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, Alexa Robinson, and their three boys, ages 5 and under.
"Being here in Brooklyn, I've been watching, enjoying and reading all these great neighborhood blogs like Brownstoner, Curbed and Gowanus Lounge," he said. "You could just see there was this wonderful zone where people were actually the true experts. When it comes to the question of what's going on in the community, the folks who really know the most are the folks who live in the community."
On a recent trip to Denver, for example, Johnson wanted to find out what was going on near his hotel, so he plugged its ZIP code into his Web site. One of the top terms that came up was the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed an addition to the recently reopened Denver Art Museum.
"Five of the posts were from local bloggers about the museum," Johnson said.
"So I had this kind of insider knowledge about what folks were actually saying that would have been very hard to get to without knowing that was a conversation that was happening in that neighborhood. What this lets you do, which was very, very hard to do before -- if not impossible -- is to find any neighborhood in any of these 50 cities we're covering now and see what people are actually talking about, what the buzz is."
In recounting the cholera outbreak in The Ghost Map, Johnson said he saw the opportunity to explore one of the tenets of Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist: that neighborhoods can solve the very problems they create.
"The story, when it was told in the past, has been told as a story about public health and epidemiology and, in some sense, information design, because of the map," Johnson said. "But I really wanted to also tell it as a story about urbanism. Because it's one of those cases where the kind of density of the environment both created the problem itself -- made it a lot more hospitable for the cholera to thrive -- and at the same time it was the density of the settlement that ultimately revealed the pattern which you can see in the map that pointed to the water as the primary problem."
Someone who majored in semantics (at Brown University), studied the 19th-century novel in graduate school (at Columbia) and wrote five books might be expected to show a clear preference for the printed page. Johnson said that he is happiest when he is writing a book. But he has also always been interested in the potential of computers; he was among the first to have a Mac in college. While the Web is widely assumed to move people away from actual interaction, Johnson sees in it the precise opposite: Computers have the capacity to foster human connection.
"It really shows that the old idea that the Internet was going to make cities obsolete had it exactly wrong," he said. "In fact the Internet enhances cities in all these different ways. I think it lets people have the kinds of conversations that we sentimentally always imagined that people were having."
"When you combine that mix of the opportunity for discussion and debate between people who don't necessarily know each other, when it's all grounded in an actual physical place and it's not just about going into a game world and arguing over dragons or something like that," he continued, "then I think you have something that is a real enhancement of civic conversation and the kind of public space that's so important in a great city."
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