Immersion Culture

To follow up to my last post, I’m not a technophobe, and I’m certainly not willing to vilify pop culture, mass media, or passions for art and stories, no matter what medium in which they appear. There will always be lowbrow and highbrow, and portions of the elite will always rail about the gulf of lowbrow overtaking their precious institutions. I don’t doubt that pre-mass media cultures had their aesthetic divisions; the difference is that the media age has brought the low and middlebrow into better view.

Yet I still find myself concerned. Thanks to copyright law, economic expansion, and the rise of the leisure culture, we’ve seen an explosion of creative works in the last hundred years. Indeed, creative works have become integral to the fabric of our culture; from movies to commercials to billboards, they permeate our day to day lives. And in some ways, this is a wonderful thing, a way of providing flash and color to daily existence.

For some, as the story on media immersion pods illustrates, it’s also created a dependency. It’s too easy to retreat into the world of stories, of fabricated universes and preordained events. These mediums are so comforting, for some, because they allow the feeling of relational contact without any of the effort. Whether it’s magazines, books, video games, movies, television, or whatever other internet distractions you stumble upon, there’s an ease of access to these simulated relationships that makes them difficult to leave. American society revels in a that culture prizes individuality and individual experience, but what happens when the individual becomes divorced from society and addicted to the culture? Are we pushing ourselves toward a society so obsessed with individual experience that all experience comes to us as lonely individuals?