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All Quotes by author - Steven Johnson
" As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation. "
Sometimes
Eyes
Isolation
" 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. "
Radio
Working
Knowledge
" 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 the grown child confronts them. "
Childhood
World
Child
" For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. "
Simple
Dumb
Culture
" If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible. "
Us
Open
Door
" If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect. "
Innovation
Ideas
People
" If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative. "
Live
Ideas
Innovation
" I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important. "
Trying
Violence
Story
" 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. "
My Life
Meetings
Love
" 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. "
Boss
System
Hands
" 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. "
Sports
Strategy
Chess
" 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. "
Society
Amazing
Achievement
" 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. "
Culture
Work
Society
" 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. "
Decision
Minds
End
" 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. "
More
Problem
Sense
" 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. "
Media
Amazing
Changes
" 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. "
Ideas
Yourself
Smart
" What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that. "
New
More
Books
" 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. "
People
Great
Ideas
" When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive. "
Sharing
You
Ideas
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