Daily Times

Technology has reformed the world beyond understanding and with tremendously terrific speed and consequently, the age-long and established value system is under threat of annihilation. One of these values is the exercise of imagination in creating imaginary at the individual and the national level.

Creativity is at work all the time to make as much beautiful life as possible and to create not only the arts but also artistically beautiful machines and structures. When imagination or the working of imagination is not allowed to thrive, the beauty of human life ceases to exist, so the value system changes.

The imaginary of a nation is the ideals that the poets or the writers conceive and then spread among their people. These imaginative and creative dreams become the ideals of a nation and so are called the Imaginary of the country. In the past time, Homer and Virgil did so. The same has been the case with Aristotle, Demosthenes and Dionysius. Shakespeare and Milton created the imaginary of their nation, sometimes to morally reform and sometimes to make dreams of success and glory. The modern-day writers, too, in their own way, indulged in imaginative corollaries and provided their nations with the ideals of their dreams. A few of these became permanently the ideals and imaginary of the nation. Postcolonial writers are most significant in this regard because they have voiced the opinion and imaginary of their formerly colonised countries. They have created a third space where the representation of all such people has become possible. But with the advent of the 21st century with its stormy developments of AI (Artificial intelligence) exercised and manipulated through the world of the Internet, the imaginary is on the verge of death because of the end of creativity. Now we have multiple types of authors on Facebook and YouTube who are spreading their rapidly and randomly created content. Their following spreads so quickly that they become celebrities on such platforms overnight. But the purpose behind all this is not the literary or artistic creativity but the money-making and minting of money. Every young man and woman and even senior citizens, is indulging in it with such a speed that we have a mixture and plethora of content consumed only for the sake of copying and plagiarizing.

Thanks to the internet and computer technology, Artificial intelligence and software like ChatGTP have made it a lot easier than anyone with training in keyboard and computer interface has become capable of writing and presenting it to hungry people to consume the content as early as possible. This all said is good for us as we have begun to believe that to be an author is not a God-gifted quality but rather a computer-gifted quality, so all of us or anyone can be an author. But the best outcome is that there is plenty of material to read and benefit from, but originality and creativity have died somewhere on their path to retain themselves. The result is the absence of genuine authors marginalized in the market. Some have been put aside because of a lack of computer skills, and some have left because of saturation. But, yes, a few of these worth reading are still struggling to survive. In the last century, creativity was believed to be the job of literary human beings. The scientists left this arena to concentrate more on their technical things. The people who studied classics and were with an artistic bent of mind were expected to create something with a vision, originality, and creativity to influence the mind and thinking of a person. Consequently, these writers made their marks and developed the words to become part of the culture and civilization of the nation.

Although computer technology has made writing books and pieces of literature easier, more comfortable, quicker and has increased not only the number of writers but also created a market for these materials and contents. The publishing of literary content now is optional to be submitted to the printing presses because many online sources help publish the materials online and in pdf formats. But whatever the case may be, most of the content is of that quality which may be able to arrest the mind of the reader and may be able to engage the reader for a positive and better change for society. Like any other age, the age of information technology also has brought changes in social values suitable to it, and so is the scene of creative arts and literature. The same creativity is under threat in the classroom because of the entry of robots in teaching children and the availability of ChatGTP to provide readymade materials to the students who may not be required to use their minds to exercise and solve problems on their own. This rapid technological intervention into the human world would make creativity redundant and the human teacher in the classrooms.

The writer is a professor of English at Government Emerson University, Multan. He can be reached at zeadogar@hotmail.com and Tweets at @Profzee