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
motivation inspiration water
One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.
water may impossible
Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
ideas innovation looks
If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
ideas people meetings
When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.
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.
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.'
art technology design
The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.
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.