Menu
Foreword:
I was born in a hospital not more than two hundred metres from where my parents lived. The main access route to town centre was this road and along this road was my dentist's practice, a road I walked for over two decades. The walk would only have taken ten minutes and, luckily, went as the crow flies. Nevertheless, despite the straightness of the road, the decades of experience I had gained through living in the area. I got lost. Lost on a straight road. It was one of those moments where, suddenly, my attention snaps back to my surroundings, often confusedly. Disorientated, my thoughts begin rushing through my head; "Have I missed it", "How far down is it?" At once, my progress stops. Shrouded in doubt, I turn to the only way of dealing with the situation I know. Systematic exploration. Walk down one road, across and back up the next. Carry on this procedure until the destination is reached. So, determinedly setting off down, across, up etc… like a humanised game of snake. Eventually, I reached a point completely sure the dentist had not been passed. That in fact, it was one road after my attentional realignment had occurred and I had double-back on myself fruitlessly. I don't know how often this happens to other people but it frequents me quite regularly.
It appears that, all too easily, I become immersed. Not with where I am heading, it is a road requiring no awareness beyond the occasional crossing, but with what is occurring somewhere else. Even though I am immersed by environment in its physical encapsulation of me, internally there is always another object being scrutinised. A play thing, the mental version of a toy. Either some narrative, real-life quandary, even recantations of shopping lists invade my thoughts and fully occupy the single-minded consciousness I am granted. The malady that I suffer from is hyper-immersion and perhaps it may be a systematically produced symptom of contemporary life. This is what fascinates me about immersion, what it is, where we get immersed and how that immersion acts in different ways. This ‘paper’ is a starting point for readers or researchers wanting to take the least ergodic path and find a variety of quotes by authors relevant in the field that inform the ramblings of a student.
It appears that, all too easily, I become immersed. Not with where I am heading, it is a road requiring no awareness beyond the occasional crossing, but with what is occurring somewhere else. Even though I am immersed by environment in its physical encapsulation of me, internally there is always another object being scrutinised. A play thing, the mental version of a toy. Either some narrative, real-life quandary, even recantations of shopping lists invade my thoughts and fully occupy the single-minded consciousness I am granted. The malady that I suffer from is hyper-immersion and perhaps it may be a systematically produced symptom of contemporary life. This is what fascinates me about immersion, what it is, where we get immersed and how that immersion acts in different ways. This ‘paper’ is a starting point for readers or researchers wanting to take the least ergodic path and find a variety of quotes by authors relevant in the field that inform the ramblings of a student.