I use to be afraid that no one would read novels anymore. The more technology increased with providing images for the eye to see, the more I began to believe that the imagination would disappear.
And then technology brought a few saviors.
My fear? The films that I actual love: Science Fiction and Fantasy. As every year passed, technology put to screen the imagination that once sat in the mind. We use to just have comics on paper; game boards and small self-painted figurines for Dungeons and Dragons; the Renaissance Festivals and Muppets. Yeah, Muppets made up for imaginations, and so did cartoons. Jim Henson was The Man with his puppets like in The Dark Crystal (1982). And then time flashed forward and films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) came out. That film opened many eyes and even brought fear to actors and actresses who started copyrighting their faces and features so that it couldn’t be duplicated in CGI without permission. “OMG! They won’t need us anymore!” the actor’s mind screamed. “It will all be Computer Animated! And computers don’t argue back on how to say a line, or want to argue about adding additional lines. It would be so much easier for the director and we’ll be paid less and less!”
Then Television had to keep up with Film and Cable, and CGI entered that world, and story lines got better and my favorite shows became a must to watch: Stargate, Fringe, Dexter, True Blood, Game of Thrones, and on and on and on….
Then there were these incredible games like Final Fantasy XIII and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with graphics that blow your mind! Grass move, stars gazing with realistic movement of clouds, individual voices and characters with stories and attitudes and religion, night turns to day and day into night, and even the food looks like something you want to pick off the screen and have on your own table in these games. I’m not a gamer, but my significant other is. And I sit and type and do my social network, and I watch this engrossing world that is simply… Beautiful!
There’s nothing needed for your own imagination when it’s visually there for the picking.
So… I thought novels and books were going to be obsolete.
And then eReaders started to explode, and I saw how SO MANY PEOPLE who weren’t readers of novels and books before, became readers. The Kindle became an desired object, and one can even read from your own cellular phone. There’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, Forums and all sorts of things online that one must read; and even the entertainment on game consoles had entire novels to read like in Skyrim where books sit on shelves of castles and huts and cabins that have completed stories for the gamers to read.
To Read. Sigh.
The imagination inside the mind hasn’t disappeared yet. In fact, it’s growing!
Until Next Time!
