Pre-fabricated worlds of imagination
"When I was young, in the very last days before television and video games came to dominate American childhood, we created our own worlds with intricate story lines, practicing the psychic technologies that adults can use to fashion their lives and their collective reality: forming a vision, telling a story around that vision that assigns meanings and roles, playing out these roles and so on."
"Today, those worlds of the imagination come pre-fabricated from T.V studios and software companies, and children wander through cheap, gaudy, often violent worlds created by distant strangers. These come with pre-fabricated images as well, and the ability to form their own images (we call this ability imagination) atrophies."
"Unable to envision a new world, the child grows up accustomed to accepting whatever reality is handed her (or she accepts no reality at all, discounting everything as just so many images and symbols. On the one hand, this allows her to "see through the bullshit", on the other hand, it leaves her cynical and jaded). Could this, perhaps, be contributing to the political passivity of the American public?"
- Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics