Psychology of Immersion in Media (Books, TV, Film, Theatre).
Immersion in Media What is Immersive technology and how does it induce Hyperreality? What makes the viewer immersed? Which technology is more immersive? SAMPLE PAGES: (this is the direction i want to go in) Immersion and virtual reality takes on many different forms. In textual form, a reader can experience immersion in similar ways as one would in the theatre. As referenced by Marie-Laurie Ryan in “Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media” psychologists Richard Gerrig and Victor Nell describe the effects of immersion as “entranced readership”, in which the reader is “lost in a book”. The reasons for this immersion stems partially from the principle of pleasure. In Freudian psychology this is the “instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs”. This would explain the large clamor for fantasy novels such as JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Series or George RR Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice Series.
What makes the books so addicting is the transportation to another seemingly foreign land only to find that the story is one we’ve heard of before. Ryan surmises from Nell that “The most immersive texts are therefore often the most familiar ones”(Ryan 96). The originality of the reading material is not as important as how accessible it is to the reader and the craft of the work. The immersive work is not always original, but allows for the creativity of the reader to run wild. For Nell, “To remain pleasurable the experience of being lost in a book must be temporary and remain distinct from addictive.” (Ryan 97). This means that in order to maintain the potency of immersion it cannot be sustained for a long time. Given that the theatre is a place that one has to travel to rather than somewhere as easily transported to like the comfort of one′s home or bed with a book, immersion may be operating even better than it would on stage than it is on the page. Another technology of immersion has to do with the screen and it much more similar to the mechanics of the theatre than than that of text; and when discussing Virtual Reality, it is arguably the most familiar. First, I will discuss television and then it’s longer form, the feature film, much more similar in narrative structure to that of a long form play or theatre. With the increase of social media, mobile TV and viewer participation on social networks, comes the ease of bringing a high level of immersion to a medium that, now in recent years, can be easily transported and doesn’t restrict the viewer to participate within designated spaces like theatre. Moreover, like the theatre, television has the visual to aid the consumer in the immersion process.