Steven Johnson Quotes

41 quotes in 907 categories

• Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and…
• Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.
• As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
• If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
• When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.
• Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when…
• I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings…
• I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or…
• In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions…
• It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime…
• Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it…
• Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on…
• 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 in…
• We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a…
• What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment…
• What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring…
• 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…
• The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk;…
• This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s…
• Chance favors the connected mind.

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