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
innovation permission thrive
When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
hands decision boss
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 are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.
ideas people viewpoints
Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.
ideas creating giving
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
smart crowds individual
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 that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
force being-wrong
Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.
shadow maps hovering
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
motivation inspiration mind
Chance favors the connected mind.
industrial lower tax
I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates.
good home ownership rate start
Obviously, you're not going to get to 100 percent, but you can make big improvements. The African-American home ownership rate here is 40 percent. Nationally, it's 48 percent. If we can make up that 8 percent, well, that's a good start right there.
sports dragons games
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.
inspiration ideas people
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 those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
art technology design
The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.
book love-is europe
One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.