Labun Jordan: Limits of Imagination

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(Host) It’s an old saying that we’re limited only by our imaginations…
and maybe it isn’t exactly accurate. But as she works to help Vermont
communities discover the benefits on-line networking, commentator Helen
Labun Jordan has started to look at that possibility from a new
perspective.

(Labun Jordan) I once believed that if I drew a
picture of my backyard turning into a carnival and then imagined real
hard, it would come true. Or if I made a potion of rainwater, pine
needles, and poisonous honeysuckle berries and imagined it controlling
the weather, the sun would shine. I didn’t believe these things for very
long. But the grown ups on shows like Reading Rainbow had assured me
that I was limited only by my imagination, so I figured it was worth a
try. I’m sorry to report that they were wrong.

Still, it’s hard
to simply give up on the Reading Rainbow vision of the power of
imagination. And it turns out that the limits of imagination and the
limits of reality are in fact quite complicated for my generation; no
sooner do we learn to respect reality than a new facet of the digital
revolution begins to change it. Personal computers, the Internet, mobile
devices, all followed one after another, removing or transforming
reality’s previous limitations overnight.

Distance disappeared –
we can communicate anywhere in the world in real time. All of our
voices have been amplified – we each have an opportunity to reach
millions of people at the cost of an Internet subscription. This means
that an average person can spread a clever idea across the globe, or
bring an ambitious project to enough small investors to make it happen
five dollars at a time. Tools that were once expensive have become cheap
– letting almost anyone edit their own movie or compute advanced
mathematics… or make a new app for something no one has ever thought of
before. We expect things that aren’t possible today to become possible
tomorrow.

Granted, we haven’t all invented apps, made movies or
moved masses. The truth is that even if imagination were our only limit,
it’s still a limit. But we’re trying to get beyond this limit too . . .
and to do so we’re returning to some of the same tools we used as
imaginative kids.

We play games. There are games designed to
help imagine a response to the end of oil, or to pair human players with
computers to see what creative thinking can result from combining our
insight with their data processing. Games that inspire us to imagine new
things are being built right here in Vermont, at the Emergent Media
Center.

We tell stories. And I’m not just talking Facebook
posts. Vermont-born artist Jonathan Harris crafts his best known works
from the Web, weaving story snippets into sagas and data into portraits
of our age.

And naturally as we tell stories, we also hear
stories. Every day brings new online talks by the world’s most ingenious
thinkers and online learning through educational centers, including
those in Vermont.

So, while it may be true that there are
limitations – and our imagination is one of them – we’re also
discovering just how far imagination might take us, then pushing that
limit out a little bit further.

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