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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages
A symbiosis exists. Technology impacts on social aspects and social aspects impact on technology. Imagination came first. Imagination is intellectual technology. Imagination manned the cosmos and scientific developments followed.
Technology depends on the fanciful ideas of artists, of often weird Kafka-like, Dali-like artists. Throughout history, throughout religion, throughout literature, imagination and science have been linked. A ladder reaches heaven in Genesis. Hindu artwork depicts a rocket to the moon. Christian articles of faith involve bodily ascension to heaven. Jules Verne journeyed to the bottom of the sea and into space. Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio. In George Orwell's 1984, the surveillance that followed the characters is not only feasible today but in effect, in every corner store, at every bank machine. The Stealth fighter is remarkably reminiscent of Star Wars aircraft.
These imaginary technologies were created by visionaries, with or without divine intervention or input, by artists, by creative artists, working out in their imaginations things, in those times, impossible in reality; they wrote the most wonderful scientific fairy tales and the artists had a wonderful time. Yet the magic was magic only until science explained it. Things that seemed a really good story even fifty years ago are no longer fiction. Disasters that seemed MGM and that...
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