Immersion

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Interlude (I) – Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover
& Chapter 3 – The Text as World: Theories of Immersion
& Interlude (II) – The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola
& Chapter 4 – Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion
& Chapter 5 – Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion

Ryan writes about an interesting character called Ignatius of Loyola, who encouraged people to vividly visualize scenes from the Bible as a means of achieving a more immersive and spiritual experience: “The originality of the method resides in the idea that the involvement of the sense of the body – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – can be used as stepping stones toward the involvement of the two sense of the soul: the will and the intellect” (116). While this example may be seen as a case of religious rather than spiritual experience, the point is that immersion has the potential to be linked with spiritual engagement. As Ryan explains, “In the Spiritual Exercises the founder of the Jesuits produced a meticulous description of the mental operations that lead to immersion in a textual world” (115).

The point that Ryan makes so eloquently is that there is nothing wrong with immersion. Many people have criticized the vision of VR by arguing that immersion is dangerous to our frail psyches, as if we will lose all sense of reality. This is the tired old argument that people have used to protest against role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which frankly I see no problem with. Furthermore, it seems to be a conflation of immersion and escapism, which are rather different. And I think that our use of the word "user" to describe people who engage with things like MUIs even further serves to pathologize the immersive experience, as if it is analogous to a "drug user."

Anyway, on the contrary, immersion is - and always has been in painting, literature, television, etc. - a transcendent opportunity, one which may approach what, indeed, we mean by spiritual engagement. For example, "Baudelaire regards the artificial not as a copy that should make up for a lost original but as a way to overcome the terrifying chaos of organic life” (75). The more one becomes immersed in the experience, the greater this ability to overcome.

Ryan identifies 3 different kinds of immersion: “spatial immersion, the response to setting; temporal immersion, the response to plot; and emotional immersion, the response to character” (121). She quotes Marcel Proust who describes the experience of the latter:

[I found myself] giving more attention and tenderness to characters in books than to people in real life, not always daring to admit how much I loved them… those people, for whom I had panted and sobbed, and whom, at the close of the book, I would never see again, and no longer know anything about…. I would have wanted so much for these books to continue, and if that were impossible, to have other information on all those characters, to learn now something about their lives, to devote mine to things that might not be entirely foreign to the love they had inspired in me and whose object I was suddenly missing… beings who tomorrow would be but names on a forgotten page, in a book having no connection with life. – Marcel Proust (140).

(Immediately, I am reminded of the experience described by Turkle in her Life on the Screen.)

And for yet another example, the immersive potential of tragedy has long been recognized: “Ever since Aristotle defined the effect of tragedy as catharsis, or purification through terror and pity, it has been taken for granted that literary fictions can elicit the same spectrum of emotional reactions in the reader as real-life situations: empathy, sadness, relief, laughter, admiration, spite, fear, and even sexual arousal” (148).

And now the Internet creates greater opportunity for the kind of voyeurism that has always drawn us into narrative: “Whether or not we like to admit it, voyeurism has a lot to do with the pleasures we take in narrative fiction: where else but in a novel can we penetrate into the most guarded and the most fascinating of realms, the inner workings of a foreign consciousness” (149)? I do wonder though, if we would do well to get rid of some of the voyeuristic quality of Internet engagement and trade it for more profound opportunities for connection with people. In other words, I see Ryan's point, but to the degree that we can avoid it, I'm not sure it's worth emulating voyeurism in cyberspace as a means of designing immersive experiences; though I can kind of understand how we got to this point where voyeurism has become such a fundamental part of cyberspace.

Ryan explains other ways to create an immersive experience: “The depth of immersion – what Walton calls the richness of the game of make-believe – depends on the style of the representation as well as on the disposition of the reader” (110). (This dispositional factor is why a small few people may lose touch with reality when playing Dungeons and Dragons or playing MUIs.) But more specifically, “For immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world” (90)…. ‘A world is not a collection of fragments, nor even an amalgam of pieces. It is a felt totality or whole’ [Michael Heim]” (91).

The question here is - assuming that immersion offers spiritual potential and is something to design for - whether there is any coherence in the current design of the Internet. There may be pockets of coherence. But I think that the democratic ideals of the Internet supersede any ambition of coherence, so that individual expression and creativity win the day. Is the result something incomprehensible to the point that it interferes with immersive - and spiritual - potential? I realize this is beginning to sound like I'm advocating totalitarian control over creative space... but I'm just musing over these questions.