In the context of virtual environments, one of the words I keep hearing over and over is ‘immersion’. In more than half of cases, what people mean when they say ‘immersion’ is actually ‘immediacy’.
Immersion itself has about a dozen definitions, but excluding the ones associated with astronomy, or fluid, the rest are all about attention, focus and concentration. I’ve talked about that before.
Immersion’s important. Without it, most things are a flop, from movies to business meetings. If something isn’t holding your attention, you’re probably neither getting much out of it, nor putting much into it.
More importantly though, is that immersion is the key to other things. It’s an absolute requirement for augmentation (for the reasons above), and without it you can’t have immediacy. Immediacy technically means directness, but its a whole lot more than that.
Forgot you were watching a film because you were swept up in it? That’s immediacy. Feel like you have some sort of connection to a place or set of events through a live television broadcast? That’s immediacy. Feel like you’re present in a game or a virtual environment? That’s immediacy.
Immediacy is the perfection, or erasure, of the gap between signifier and signified, such that a representation is perceived to be the thing itself. It is a consequence of what Kenneth Burke calls “naive verbal realism” whereby the symbol is simply perceived to be a window to the real. In Remediation, immediacy (or transparent immediacy) is defined as a “style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation” (Bolter and Grusin 272-73).[*]
Breaking the fourth wall, or being out-of-character, or having a strong or unavoidable sense of the medium or the user-interface? That’s hypermediacy.
Of course immediacy can shatter if hypermediacy creeps in, or if immersion should be broken. Most of the time that we talk about immersion being broken, though, immersion may be intact, and what has broken is immediacy.
And that’s why it’s so confusing. More than half the time, we say one thing and mean something else, but it isn’t always entirely clear what is being talked about.
The quote says that immediacy is the erasure of the gap between signifier and signified, such that a representation is perceived to be the thing itself.
Michel Foucault said that science in the eighteenth century was based on the assumption that the nature of things could be read through signs on their surface. For example, linnean botany classified plants on the basis of visible signs, such as the number of stamens. The gap between the signifier and what it signified was paper-thin, because representation was thought to present the entire reality.
Modern thought emerged in the early nineteenth century with the understanding that things are opaque, and that their inner nature hides beneath their external representation. Cuvier began taking biological specimens out of formaldehyde and dissecting them, to find out what lay below the surface. A gap opened up between our knowledge of the signifier, and our knowledge of the signified. As Kant put, it became difficult to know the “thing in itself.”
In an experience of artistic immediacy, we remember that the representation differs from the thing represented. Rather than collapsing the chain of representations, I think virtuality adds still more layers to it: we get a sign that represents another sign that represents yet something else. This type of “immediacy” may be powerful but it is far from what the term originally meant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg
This is not a pipe
Immersion isn’t confusing at all, if you understand how our minds make sense of the world.
Our bodies are bombarded with inputs from the physical world through our senses. These inputs are not nicely tagged with semantic information so that we instantly know what they mean on arrival. Instead, they’re low level optic, acoustic, tactile or other physical stimuli, and they mean almost nothing at their point of reception in our sensory organs.
The way our minds make sense of this mess is by creating mental models of our environment, and interpreting the inputs we receive as events in that model. This is why we see nice straight lines on door edges instead of the badly distorted and noisy picture created on our retina by the very imperfect jelly lenses of our eyes. We don’t actually perceive reality. We perceive a mental world created by our minds, which we keep in sync with incoming inputs. Our minds play a trick on us, making us think that our constructed mental model is actual reality. That trick is called “immersion”, and our minds are very good at it.
It’s a skill that goes far beyond just making sense of the physical world. We use the same skill when we read a novel, watch a film, or play an online game. We are very well adapted to creating virtual worlds in our minds even from very rudimentary inputs, which is why mere text can create the same kind of immersion and physical emotion in us as a full sensory environment. It’s why people with sensory disabilities can still lead a fully immersive life. And it’s why we gesticulate and even blush when talking on the phone to someone on the other side of the world — that’s your mind immersing you so deeply that your body reacts physically as if the remote person is right in front of you.
So no, there is no need to invent some additional term “immediacy”. It’s the entire purpose of immersion to make us experience the mental models of our minds as real. Immersion has no other purpose or effect.
Morgaine.
Ah, you see, now that is what is traditionally called ‘immediacy’. ‘immersion’ is the process of focusing on some sensory input while discarding the rest. Thus in many (though obviously not all) cases, immersion is a prerequisite for immediacy.
I see no reason to add the meaning of the word ‘immediacy’ to the word ‘immersion’ – that just complicates the issue.
You don’t need to add the meaning of the word “immediacy” to the word “immersion” because it’s there already. Indeed, it is the only meaning that is there, since there is nothing else in “immersion”.
Delivering to us this direct experience of a mental model as reality is the whole point, purpose, and use of the mechanism of immersion, not some side property of it. The mechanism has no other purpose, so your introduction of another word adds nothing.
My point is that they’ve been distinct and separate concepts for a long time, and only recently conflated and confused. Said conflation and confusion leading to a lot of people arguing with a lot of other people about things that they actually don’t have any particular difference about – but don’t realise it.
Isn’t a goal of communication to be able to understand what each-other is talking about, and to make one’s points as simply, clearly and unambiguously as possible? When you say ‘immersion’, I have to wonder if you mean ‘immersion’ (as in a quality of selective focus) or ‘immediacy’ (the sense of existing in a different place) – two essentially different (though related) meanings that the context of the speaker – more often than not – does not make clear.
“Immersion” means only one thing. Ask anyone who has been immersed to describe the effect of being immersed and you’ll get the same answer. It doesn’t have two meanings, it’s inextricable from the sense of being deep within a place. Indeed, that’s what the word “immersed” conveys perfectly.
Not sure why you’re bringing up “focus” though. Focus is different to immersion, as you can be totally immersed without being focused on anything in particular. If you want a term to denote “focus” then I suggest that you call it “focus”. Everyone knows what that is too.
Nevermind. I think we’re done here.