Imagination Age

The imagination age is a theoretical period beyond the information age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value. This contrasts with the information age where analysis and thinking were the main activities. The concept holds that technologies like virtual reality, user created content and YouTube will change the way humans interact with each other and how they create economic and social structures. A key concept is that the rise of the immersive virtual reality, the cyberspace or the metaverse will raise the value of imagination work of designers, artists, video makers and actors over rational thinking as a foundation of culture and economics.

The terms imagination age and "age of imagination" were first introduced in an essay by designer and writer Charlie Magee in 1993. His essay, "The Age of Imagination: Coming Soon to a Civilization Near You" proposes the idea that the best way to assess the evolution of human civilization is through the lens of communication.

The most successful groups throughout human history have had one thing in common: when compared to their competition they had the best system of communication. The fittest communicators—whether tribe, citystate, kingdom, corporation, or nation—had (1) a larger percentage of people with (2) access to (3) higher quality information, (4) a greater ability to transform that information into knowledge and action, (5) and more freedom to communicate that new knowledge to the other members of their group.

"Imagination Age" has been popularized as a cultural and economic philosophy by artist, writer and cultural philosopher Rita J. King in her November 2007 essay for the British Council, "The Emergence of a New Global Culture in the Imagination Age" where she began using the phrase, "Toward a New Global Culture and Economy in the Imagination Age". King further refined the development of her thinking in a 2008 Paris essay entitled, "Our Vision for Sustainable Culture in the Imagination Age" in which she states,

Active participants in the Imagination Age are becoming cultural ambassadors by introducing virtual strangers to unfamiliar customs, costumes, traditions, rituals and beliefs, which humanizes foreign cultures, contributes to a sense of belonging to one’s own culture and fosters an interdependent perspective on sharing the riches of all systems. Cultural transformation is a constant process, and the challenges of modernization can threaten identity, which leads to unrest and eventually, if left unchecked, to violent conflict. Under such conditions it is tempting to impose homogeneity, which undermines the highly specific systems that encompass the myriad luminosity of the human experience.

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