Entertain your brain with nothing and all

‘Dude, put that freaky thing away!’, a friend of mine used to say when I had opened a book in his presence.  He wasn’t one of my 3 high school peers that did the actual reading for the literature course. Books were plainly boring. And if you switch off your effort to vivify, he is right: a literature book is a bundle of papers overly filled with black jitter.

The written story itself doesn’t do any exciting tricks, but your imagination does (ask SpongeBob). With a 50 inch plasma 3D television screen, my friend didn’t have any reason to put effort into triggering his own imagination. Combined with a subwoofer as big as a washing machine, his home theater did an awesome job doing the dirty work for him.

Actually we don’t need a lot in the outside world to entertain ourselves. Kids are the classics here. I have to admit I needed to repeatedly watch either “Snow White” or “Dumbo” when I was very young, but after that the only thing I needed was to run around, fantasizing about knights, adventures and dogs playing soccer.

While books and board games have their fair share, immersive movies and video games keep on rising due to technological improvements. They almost provide the real deal experiences and are highly accessible in terms of required effort. Take the future itself. You don’t necessarily need a game or movie to get excited about it, but of course there is. Like the recently released movie “Ready Player One”. If you are afraid it will make your brains too lazy or if you are just a pro-books person, don’t worry about this one; it’s based on the book by Ernest Cline.

Search engines and data storage make our brains forget about specific information but improve our memory where and how to find information. Will entertaining technology make our imagination lazier but foster the ability to excite ourselves by external tools? Or is imagination too distinct and essential to be replaced in this way? Probably internal imagination and external inspiration remain to co-exist. As much as I appreciate the convenient thrill of my friend’s home theater, I will keep on reading stories as well. It just feels like another dimension.

Bron: