Quotes from Steven Johnson

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.

If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.