/ˌinəˈvāSH(ə)n/
“…innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organization”
…and, I might add, species.
Harnessing fire, inventing the wheel, spoken then written language, math, art, science, observing, imagining and reimagining has been the gift and the strength as well as the challenge and scourge of humans throughout our evolution, (with apologies to any creationist nitwits who may have inadvertently stumbled into my world). Although there are ample, documented cases of other species’ problem-solving capabilities, humans, alone, have shown the capacity of using both deductive reasoning and a keen awareness of happenstance to realign the elements of the natural world. I’m going to take an uneducated stab at what a “Good Result”/“Bad Result” chart would look like and say that, for most of our two-legged existence, the sides would be relatively equal. The innovators, the famous and not so, perhaps skewed slightly more toward the “Good”, had spheres of influence that expanded exponentially with their inventions of the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television and the Internet. The fruits of their labors, however, were regularly usurped by less clever wielders of power to contaminate or repurpose them for greed and extended or enhanced power. The dastardly manipulations of otherwise good-intentioned progress have been the fodder of real and fictionalized cloak and dagger scenarios since…well, since there were cloaks and daggers. Not today. In the present, all-the-news-all-the-time dizzying cyber/cable/Twitterdom, 21st century innovation has erupted into a spew of mostly soulless blather oozing with memes and tweets, phishing and trolling while being endlessly tracked and sorted and evaluated by hundreds of thousands of cross-purposed algorithms targeting, cancelling and influencing at light speed. The “Good” side of the chart continues to grow, albeit at a pace easily trackable in real time, while the “Bad” is expanding, page after page, in a dizzying blur.
If this were a video game, and it well might be, we’re only a few plays away from the dreaded “GAME OVER” accompanied by the ominous Dragnet theme.