Steven Johnson

We need to play each others instruments.

— Steven Johnson

Chance favors the connected mind.

— Steven Johnson

“Build a tangled bank.”

— Steven Johnson

That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.

— Steven Johnson

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

— Steven Johnson

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.

— Steven Johnson

Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.

— Steven Johnson

The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.

— Steven Johnson

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can…

— Steven Johnson

“An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence.” We’re blind to our blindness.”

— Steven Johnson

“An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.”

— Steven Johnson

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is…

— Steven Johnson

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick…

— Steven Johnson

“Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to…

— Steven Johnson

I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only…

— Steven Johnson

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

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by…

— Steven Johnson

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about…

— Steven Johnson

What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself…

— Steven Johnson

It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's…

— Steven Johnson

“The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a…

— Steven Johnson

“Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning “disks for the eyes.” Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the…

— Steven Johnson

Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by…

— Steven Johnson

We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs,…

— Steven Johnson

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go…

— Steven Johnson

“When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you…

— Steven Johnson

“And so it was with the Broad Street well that the decision to remove the pump handle turned out to be more…

— Steven Johnson

“We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend…

— Steven Johnson

“Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing…

— Steven Johnson

Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years…

— Steven Johnson

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,…

— Steven Johnson

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking…

— Steven Johnson

I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty…

— Steven Johnson

“Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear…

— Steven Johnson

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because…

— Steven Johnson

What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The…

— Steven Johnson

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

— Steven Johnson

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click…

— Steven Johnson

“What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.”

— Steven Johnson

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

— Steven Johnson