This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of… — 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 using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“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, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
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 many Americans, the first cultural common ground between black and white America that had been largely created by African-Americans.” — Steven Johnson Copy Share
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 to crowd all 10 million of them a hundred square miles than it is to spread them out, edge-city style, over a space ten or a hundred times that size. If we're going to survive as… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
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
