Some might say that technology affects our imagination by actually killing it and making people to dream less. In this essay, I will argue that it is not the case, and technology serves as a driver of our imagination.
To begin with, technology is a product of creative thinking, and being such it also leads to even more creative thinking. When engineers design a new product, let us say a mobile phone, they think about its functionality, interface and the way it looks in general. As a matter of fact, to create a technological device, one must fantasize about its features and practicability. Once it is created, the device becomes a subject of criticism, and even more creative thinking is stimulated by the urge for finding solutions to such questions as how to develop alternatives to the existent models or how to upgrade the old ones.
Secondly, technology changes the way we see the world. In other words, being involved in the processes of designing technology and upgrading it are not the only ways how technology is linked to our creative thinking and therefore the way we dream and imagine. If one goes back in time to the Middle Ages, he will learn that hardly any person of that historic period could fantasize about contacting any person in the world by simple call through the mobile phones. Today, it is not only realistic but routine. As the technology advances, it gives more grounds to imagine things that many years ago were simply unimaginable. I believe that with the scientific progress, complicated terms from physics and chemistry that are often used in scientific practice and rarely promoted to general masses (how many of us know what gravitational waves really are?) will be easily understandable even to children in the near future, thus giving them a deeper level to dream about and imagine concepts.
Thirdly, a lot of technology is educational. It not only gives as impetus to fantasize, but it also teaches as about how to fantasize. As it has been with reading in the past, today video games boost our creative thinking. Thanks to video games, children learn how to solve puzzles (either it through overcoming level obstacles or through killing powerful bosses), and hardly any medium of the past such as literature or drawing can provide as good avenue to learn creativity as video games do. Even in the military, soldiers of today are often trained how to find using video games known as combat simulators.
On the other hand, critics do not find it convincing that technology is positively associated with dreaming. The main argument against such view is that passive consumption of technology makes us benefit from someone’s creative thinking and therefore it kills our own ability to imagine. Consuming mobile phone functionality is creatively useless, as a mobile phone and its functionality turn us into consumerists of someone’s creative ideas. Watching movies does not improve our imagination either, as we are passive consumers of the director’s visualization. Technology tends to makes as passive and inert. Nonetheless, I believe it is not a fault of technology but personal attitudes. Even good things can be turned evil, given human laziness and hesitancy.
To sum up, I strongly believe that technological progress boosts the way we fantasize by giving us wider grounds for fantasies and dreams. It also often serves as an effective learning tool teaching us how to fantasize and imagine. I further believe that, if applied correctly, sooner or later technology will bring us to the full realization of our dreams.
