Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways.

The meaning of originality is highly subjective. But in the twenty-first century, originality mostly means putting old ideas together to create something new or even something better. Notion of complete originality may have been popular in historical times, but in this age of technology and engineering, where appplied science is valued over pure or theoritical science, new necessrily doesn't mean entirely new, but mostly designing something new using or improving existing technologies.

We can see in everyday marketing from technology to household products to medicine to marketing, even though they market something as new product, it is often the same old product being re-engineered with innovations in some parts, design and mostly usability. For example, when apple released the revolutionary iphone, it was not something totally new. Even Steve Jobs called it as three devices, the ipod, mobile phone and internet browser in a same device, and all three devices were already existed. Even though it revolutionized and popularized the touch screen phones, but it was not that touch screen phones were never there before, the only thing that changed and improved usability was replacement of touch stylus with finger for touch input. In this age, we call such things as technology rather than science, because it is just an engineering of existing technologies to create a beter product.

Not only in technology, we can see such improvements in any discipline, from economics where an economist may offer a better method of stabilizing the stock prices improving in existing methods to medicine, where a biologist may come up with a new compound to make a virus benign improving on existing chemicals and making use of technologies such as high performance image processing.

But, one may be skecptical to corroborate for total originality. Obviously, total originality exists, but they occurs rarely in this era. For example, it is not possible to come up with something electricity, fire, differential calculus, penicillium or periodic tables in this era, something that has never done before, or is distantly related or unrelated to anything done before. Obviously there are agencies looking for such breakthrough novel discoveries, but even if they are done, rarely impact our life and make sensation as original. But, what makes sensation as original are the ipods, iphones, a better stock prediction method, better drug for fighting against HIV and so on.

To sum up, the way we live in twenty first century, the way the product impacts our life, the way the applied science is valued over pure theoritical science, the meaning of originality has changed its meaning to the one which puts existing ideas together to create a better value in terms of innovations in design and usability. Even though the total originality exixts scantly, it will often fail to make a sensation and be limited to esoteric communities.