While interactivity has been hyped as a panacea for evils ranging from social disempowerment to writer’s block, the concept of immersion has suffered a vastly different fate. At best it has been ignored by theorists; at worst, regarded as a menace to critical thinking. (p: 9 - 10)
If we believe some of the most celebrated parables of world literature, losing oneself in a book, or in any kind of virtual reality, is a hazard for the health of the mind, immersion began to work its ravages as early as the first great novel of European literature ... [] ... The major objection against immersion is the alleged incompatibility of the experience with the exercise of critical faculties. (p: 10)
According to Jay Bolter, the impairment of critical consciousness is the trademark of both literary and VR immersion: “But is it obvious that virtual reality cannot in itself sustain intellectual or cultural development. . . . The problem is that virtual reality, at least as it is now envisioned, is a medium of percepts rather than signs. It is virtual television” (Writing Space, 230). “What is not appropriate is the absence of semiosis” (231). (p: 10)
But this does not mean that immersive pleasure is in essence a lowbrow, escapist gratification, as Bolter seems to imply. ... [] ... As for the allegedly passive character of the experience, we need only be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into the production of a vivid mental picture of a textual world. Since language does not offer input to the senses, all sensory data must be simulated by the imagination. In “The Circular Ruins” Jorge Luis Borges writes of the protagonist, who is trying to create a human being by the sheer power of his imagination, “He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality” (Ficciones, 114). Similarly, we must dream up textual worlds with “minute integrity” to conjure up the intense experience of presence that inserts them into imaginative reality. (p: 11)
If we believe some of the most celebrated parables of world literature, losing oneself in a book, or in any kind of virtual reality, is a hazard for the health of the mind, immersion began to work its ravages as early as the first great novel of European literature ... [] ... The major objection against immersion is the alleged incompatibility of the experience with the exercise of critical faculties. (p: 10)
According to Jay Bolter, the impairment of critical consciousness is the trademark of both literary and VR immersion: “But is it obvious that virtual reality cannot in itself sustain intellectual or cultural development. . . . The problem is that virtual reality, at least as it is now envisioned, is a medium of percepts rather than signs. It is virtual television” (Writing Space, 230). “What is not appropriate is the absence of semiosis” (231). (p: 10)
But this does not mean that immersive pleasure is in essence a lowbrow, escapist gratification, as Bolter seems to imply. ... [] ... As for the allegedly passive character of the experience, we need only be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into the production of a vivid mental picture of a textual world. Since language does not offer input to the senses, all sensory data must be simulated by the imagination. In “The Circular Ruins” Jorge Luis Borges writes of the protagonist, who is trying to create a human being by the sheer power of his imagination, “He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality” (Ficciones, 114). Similarly, we must dream up textual worlds with “minute integrity” to conjure up the intense experience of presence that inserts them into imaginative reality. (p: 11)
