Steven Johnson Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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 not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other's instruments.

  Steven Johnson

  Hard Work, Winning, Play

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• 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 a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.

  Steven Johnson

  Organization, Empowering, Decision

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• We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.

  Steven Johnson

  Media, Focus, Gadgets

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• Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.

  Steven Johnson

  Memories, Party, Mean

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• One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.

  Steven Johnson

  Motivation, Inspiration, Water

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

  Steven Johnson

  Design, Messages, Strange

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

  Steven Johnson

  Ideas, Innovation, Looks

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• Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

  Steven Johnson

  Snow, Intellectual, Curiosity

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.108, Penguin

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• How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.

  Steven Johnson

  Intelligent, Errors, Discipline

  Steven Johnson (2006). “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World”, p.27, Penguin

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• The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like 'Lost' or 'Alias' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.

  Steven Johnson

  Mean, Dvds, Fans

  "Watching TV Makes You Smarter". www.nytimes.com. April 24, 2005.

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• 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 a sense has gotten bigger.

  Steven Johnson

  Bottom Of The Barrel, Lame, Television

  "'Everything Bad Is Good for You'". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. May 24, 2005.

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• 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 represents some other aspect of society.

  Steven Johnson

  Criticism, Analysis, Culture

  Steven Johnson (2006). “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”, p.9, Penguin

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• 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 than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

  Steven Johnson

  Achievement, Flying, President

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

  Steven Johnson

  Water, May, Impossible

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.36, Penguin

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• 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 from my life.

  Steven Johnson

  Internet, Meetings, Havens

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

  Steven Johnson

  Ideas, People, Meetings

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• Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

  Steven Johnson

  Dog, Real, Internet

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• I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

  Steven Johnson

  Sports, Dragons, Games

  Steven Johnson (2006). “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”, p.8, Penguin

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