Zoom and Among Us: Good Ideas Made for a Pandemic
Steven Johnson is an American author who wrote a book called “Where Good Ideas Come From.”
He writes about inventors and their work, like Charles Darwin, who pioneered study of evolution and the developers of YouTube, etc.
The book goes over numerous things that lead to various forms of innovation throughout the years. The most popular being “error.” The others have to do with Serendipity, Liquid networks, Platforms.
Steven Johnson has written various books, each talking about various ways to innovate or about how people have innovated in the past. One example is “The Invention of Air,” which talks about the discovery of the element oxygen.
“Had Hurley, Chen, and Karim tried to execute YouTube 10 years earlier, it would’ve been a spectacular flop.” (Johnson, 39). When I first saw this quote , I immediately thought, “Virtual Boy” from Nintendo, in contrast to today’s Oculus.
Zoom’s Perfect Timing
If it weren’t for the pandemic, and Zoom had been released a year earlier, it would’ve struggled to find its footing alongside other bigger social media platforms as this article shows.
“Zoom was an easy to use app with little popularity, a fat minnow in an ocean filled with sharks like Microsoft before February 2020 happened.” (Bowles, 2021).
Now that there’s a pandemic that encourages people to separate from loved ones to avoid the possibility of spreading disease, Zoom has become the go-to solution for the masses. It works better than Google Meet and has better sound, which is part of the reason many schools adapted it during the quarantine.
Among Us: A Game to Keep People Together
This wasn’t the only time something like this has happened. The social video game Among Us was originally made in 2018, but only picked up any traction in 2020.
“At the start of July, Among Us averaged just a couple hundred viewers on Twitch, according to tracking site SullyGnome. In 2020, SR_Kaif, who has 136,000 followers, had been playing Among Us consistently” (Fenlon, 2020).
“Evolution is a trait that has the organism survive in a new way” (Johnson, page 154).
This second quote, by Johnson was for something different, but it can also apply to the pandemic. The worldwide pandemic was caused by a disease released to the world, and everyone has been trying to adapt to new ways to avoid getting sick or dying. People self isolate by sitting at home. Anyone infected has to be isolated (at the time I write this). Vaccines are slowly being made and people are wearing face masks, which have become mandatory in most areas.
Innovation can be caused by almost anything, whether it be after a time where it wouldn’t be possible for a type of product to survive or whether a type of event happens where events can thrive. The pandemic has shown us how the obscure becomes known, and old tech becomes new.
