Author Steven B. Johnson was perusing his Twitter feed last year and stumbled across someone mentioning his book to a friend (while and also recommending something called “Seeing Like A State.”). From there, Steven B. Johnson tracked down the book, started reading it, and ended up writing a blog post summarizing his thoughts on how his ideas get developed:

1. The discovery process is remarkably social, and the social interactions come in amazingly diverse forms. Sometimes it’s overhearing a conversation on Twitter between two complete strangers; sometimes it’s the virtual book club of something like Findings; sometimes it’s going out to lunch with a friend and bouncing new ideas off them. It’s the social life of information, in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s wonderful phrase — we just have so many more ways of being social now.

2. I find it interesting that there are certain kinds of questions that I now send out by default to Twitter, not Google. The more subtle and complex the question, the more likely it’ll go to Twitter. But if it’s simply trying to find a citation or source, I’ll use Google. So trying to figure out who wrote Seeing Like A State was a Google query, but wondering about the origins of the Internet made more sense on Twitter. (I should add that the responses I’m looking for on Twitter are links to longer discussions, not 140 character micro-essays.)

3. Priming is everything. All these new tools are incredible for making rapid-fire discoveries and associations, but you need a broad background of knowledge to prime you for those discoveries. I’m not sure I would have jumped down that wonderful rabbit hole of the French railway design if I hadn’t seen that map in grad school two decades ago. Same goes for the Hayek and the internet history as well. I had enough pre-existing knowledge to know that they belonged in the story, so when something about them got in my sights, I was ready to pounce on it.     

4. Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

5. It’s been said it a thousand times before, by me and many others, but it’s worth repeating again: people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly.

6.  Finally, this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this–Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings–would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago. 

I haven’t yet read Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, but I did read his Mind Wide Open and can recommend it.