I know what you mean about technology which limits the use of imagination. Before electronic calculators became popular at school, we had to use our brains to work out difficult sums, and this called for imagination in order to estimate a solution. Nowadays, kids just tap out a few keys and bingo, the result is displayed. The gain in speed and efficiency has been paid for by the loss of imagination and intellect.
As to films or popular music being less imaginative or original than in the past, well of course it's true but I don't see what we can do about it because technology is here to stay. The Internet is certainly responsible for a lot of trash or kitsch, just like TV and the movies were in the past few decades. Can we retire to a desert island and cut ourselves off from civilisation? I'm glad, in any case, that when I was a child in the 60's, I had books , the radio, and some monochrome TV to stimulate my imagination, rather than being bombarded by TV channels and Internet day and night. Of course you can usefully combine technology and imagination as for example in a computerized chess game which is never too tired to challenge you to another match. We just need to know how to say stop and turn it off.
Maybe the fact that the same topics appear over and over again says something about human nature rather than technology. Think about philosophers: they've all dealt with pretty much the same questions. Granted, I'm no author, Mr. Keret, but I think every piece of literature deals with different aspects of the same basic human questions and fears -- and that is what keeps books from centuries ago still relevant to the modern reader.
I actually do think that technology helps our imagination. Imagination is based on the world around us. Even your wildest stories have some base in what you know. Maimonides wrote in his introduction to the Ethics of the Fathers that there are things that you can imagine but cannot be, like a metal ship floating in the air. Besides the fact that his impossibility is now practically low-tech, the "impossible" thing he imagined still uses elements from his world. Yes, he combined them in an innovative way, but they are not completely foreign. Metal existed, as did ships, and birds flew in the air. Technology has extended the world around us and added more elements with which we can imagine the innovative.
