Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist.

Steven grew up in Washington, D.C.,^[2] where he attended St. Albans School. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics,^[3][4] a part of the school's modern culture and media department.^[5] He also has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature.

Johnson is the author of thirteen books, largely 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 the hyperlocal media site outside.in.^[6] 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.

He is the author of the best-selling book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts such as television dramas and video games have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills.

His book Where Good Ideas Come From advances a notion to challenge the popular story of a lone genius experiencing an instantaneous moment of inspiration. Johnson instead argues that innovative thinking is a slow, gradual, and very networked process in which "slow hunches" are cultivated, and completed, by exposure to seemingly unrelated ideas and quandaries from other disciplines and thinkers. He lists the themes he has identified from studying which environments and conditions have been correlated, historically, with high innovation. He argues that they make theoretical sense because of their tendency to effectively explore the "adjacent possible", Stuart Kauffman's concept (which Johnson cites) of the space of innovations waiting to be made from combining immediately-available notions and solutions.

His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age was released in September 2012.^[7]

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.^[8]

Since May 2018, Johnson has hosted the podcast American Innovations, created by Wondery.^[9][10]

Johnson is a co-host (with David Olusoga) of the PBS/Nutopia 4-part series Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, that premiered on Tuesday, May 11, 2021.^[11] Respective hour-long episodes include "Vaccines", "Data", "Medicine", and "Behavior".^[11]

After growing up in Washington, D.C., and graduating from St. Albans School in 1986, Johnson moved to New York City in 1990 and spent twenty-one years there, living in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, for seven years, then the West Village, where his first son was born.^[2] Johnson writes that, on September 11, 2001, he and his wife "watched the Twin Towers fall from Greenwich Street on our son's first day home from the hospital. When our second son was on the way, we decamped for Brooklyn..."^[2]

In 2010, interviewer Oliver Burkeman wrote that "Johnson, who lives with his wife Alexa Robinson and their three sons in Brooklyn... gives around 50 lectures a year, and writes plenty of high-profile opinion columns, all of which he has accomplished by the not-exactly-ancient age of 42. (While we're on the topic, he also has an enormous 1.4 million followers on Twitter...)"^[25]

In a 2011 blog, he wrote that he and his family would be leaving New York "for a few years" as they would be "moving to Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge across the bay from San Francisco"—"a two-year move: an adventure, not a life-changer."^[2]

Johnson talks about a near-death experience in his 2004 book Mind Wide Open. He and his wife lived in "an apartment in a renovated old warehouse on the far west edge of downtown Manhattan," a home with "a massive eight-foot-high window looking out over the Hudson River" where they often enjoyed the view. On a June afternoon, they watched "an especially severe storm" approaching. Within minutes, the storm smashed the window, of which they were not directly in front during the crisis.^[26]: 47

He has written that he has some difficulty with visual encoding, "a trait that I seem to share with Aldous Huxley," whom Johnson quotes at greater length in Mind Wide Open than cited here: "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon..."^[26]: 235

• Googleshare
• List of notable English-language science popularizers