For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats,… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“From am overall eclsyste,s perspective, if you're going to have 10million human beings trying to share an environment with other life-forms, it's much better… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons,… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
“It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
