Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
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
