As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation. Steven Johnson Read Quote
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. Steven Johnson Read Quote
If you look at where innovation – defined as ideas, not as commercial product – tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative. Steven Johnson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
When it’s a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you’re riffing off other people’s ideas, that actually can be productive. Steven Johnson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Steven Johnson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Steven Johnson Read Quote
