American - Author | June 6, 1968 -
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
PathCultureSimpleMediaDumbWant
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.
WorkTimeCultureSocietyCriticism
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.
YourselfSmartIdeasSayingBetter
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.
LifeLoveMeetingsMy LifeDoing
When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.
PeopleIdeasYouMeetingSharing
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.
GoodFocusAmazingMediaBadNew
If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
LiveInnovationIdeasYouLook
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.
PeopleDataEarlyNewMoreClearly
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