Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson
Steven Berlin Johnsonis an American popular science author and media theorist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 June 1968
CountryUnited States of America
snow intellectual curiosity
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.
media focus gadgets
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.
memories party mean
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.
design messages strange
That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
hard-work winning play
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.
dog real internet
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.'
innovation radio telephones
Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
eye ivory-tower innovation
As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
play needs instruments
We need to play each others instruments.
thinking people one-day
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 those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
ideas may want
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
past average years
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 dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.
smart ideas perspective
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 with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.
memories writing simple
Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there's an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.