The Art of Immersion Fear of Fiction Summary the Sports Taboo Blogspot
Two years ago this calendar month, as editors worldwide were beginning to contend whether anyone would really get see Avatar, the $200 meg-plus, iii-D moving picture extravaganza that James Cameron was making, Josh Quittner wrote in Fourth dimension about getting an advance await. "I couldn't tell what was real and what was animated," he gushed. "The post-obit forenoon, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return in that location, as if Pandora were existent."
It was non the beginning time someone found an entertainment experience to be weirdly immersive. For all the cut-edge technology that went into the making of Avatar, in that sense in that location was nothing new nigh it all.
Some four centuries earlier, Miguel de Cervantes reported in his satirical novel that Don Quixote went tilting at windmills because he'd lost his heed from besides much reading:
Equally Janet Murray of Georgia Tech observed in her 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck, every new medium that'due south been invented, from print to film to tv to cyberspace, has increased the transporting power of narrative. And every new medium has angry fear and even hostility as a result.
Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the early '50s — the dawn of the television era. It's about a human being whose job is burning books, a medium that past this time had long since ceased to cause alarm.
The man's married woman, like her friends, is mesmerized by the video transmissions on the behemothic "televisors" on her living room walls. "My wife says books aren't 'real,'" he tells Faber, the former English professor who gradually transforms him into a savior of books.
"Thank God for that," Faber replies. "You tin close them and say, 'Hold on a moment!' But who has ever torn himself from ... a TV parlor? ... Information technology is an environment as existent as the world. It becomes and is the truth."
That was Bradbury's beef with television — it was just too immersive. Logical, linear idea was no friction match for its seductively phosphorescent glow. Information technology became and was the truth.
Before television, the aforementioned danger could be found in the movies. In Aldous Huxley's Dauntless New World — published in 1932, five years afterward the nascence of talkies — young John the Fell is taken to the "feelies," where he is revolted by the sensation of phantom lips grazing his own as the actors kiss.
"Suddenly, dazzling and incomparably more solid-looking than they would have seemed in bodily flesh and blood, far more existent than reality, there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in 1 another'south artillery.... The Savage started. That sensation on his lips!"
Too real. Dangerously, immersively, more-real-than-reality existent. Better to curl upwards with a good book.
Oh, right.
*Go on reading ... *
For all the cutting-edge technology that went into the making of Avatar, in that sense there was nada new almost it all.Only even later on books gained acceptance, novels could still seem dangerously immersive in other formats.
A century before talkies, there was serialization. England in the 1830s was beingness radically transformed by technology. Industrialization was cartoon people to the cities in unimaginable numbers, crowding them together in appalling atmospheric condition but besides producing a dramatic rise in literacy.
At the same fourth dimension, improvements in paper, press, and transportation were making it possible to print and distribute periodicals on a much greater scale. Book publishers, being immature and scrappy, saw a market for serial fiction — books released a few capacity at a fourth dimension in flimsy paperback editions that sold for pennies.
Many authors were published in this manner, but one became identified with it above all. As a young boy, Charles Dickens had imbibed Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe; at 25 he was writing Oliver Twist in monthly installments for a new literary journal he'd been hired to edit.
The tale of an indigent boy forced into the miasma of crime and despair that was contemporary London, Oliver Twist spoke directly to the new audience that cheap serials had created. The same technological upheaval that gave rise to the workhouses Dickens described also created a readership for his story, and a way of reaching them that was inexpensive enough to be practicable.
From our perspective, Dickens is a literary master, an icon of a now-threatened culture. But at the time, he represented the threat of what was coming. Novels themselves were only start to observe acceptance in polite gild; for upper-form commentators, serialization was entirely too much.
In 1845, a critic for the patrician Due north British Review railed against the multiplying effects of serialization on the already hallucinatory powers of the novel:
Novels, in other words, were not yet on a par with more acceptable pursuits, similar games and social networking. Merely if y'all had to indulge in them, best to get it over with as quickly equally possible.
Now it'south the Cyberspace that seems new and dangerously immersive. 3 decades later on William Gibson introduced the concept of cyberspace ("A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions.... Clusters and constellations of data. Similar city lights, receding"), the internet has redefined our expectations from stories.
It's no coincidence that nosotros are beset past questions of actuality. Value is a function of scarcity, and in a time of scripted reality Tv and Photoshop everywhere, actuality is a scarce article.
Just though we alive in a globe in which identity is always in question, we also have the media savvy to sniff out fakery and the tools to spread the word. Engineering science makes authenticity suspect, and technology gives us the wherewithal to demand it — if that's what we actually desire.
Except that information technology's not what we want. It's what we call back we want. What we really want is to go back to Pandora, fifty-fifty though we've never been in that location in the first place. Nosotros want to be sucked inside the computer like Jeff Bridges in Tron. We want to exist immersed in something that'southward not real at all.
Just like Don Quixote.
Image: Gustave Doré: Miguel de Cervantes / Don Quixote / Function 1 / Chapter one / Plate 1 "A world of hell-raising notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination" (item), via Wikipedia
The Art of Immersion
- Part I: Why Exercise Nosotros Tell Stories?
- Part II: The Star Wars Generation
- **Part III: Fright of Fiction
**
Source: https://www.wired.com/2011/03/immersion-fear-of-fiction/
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