Steven Johnson Quotes

The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.

Chance favors the connected mind.

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.

Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.

We need to play each others instruments.

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.

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Build a tangled bank.

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

...if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.

Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.