Immersion
In speaking to a number of organizations and researchers who work in the deliberately developmental spaces field, a word that has frequently come up has been ‘immersion’- or ‘immersed’, or ‘immersive’. Interestingly, it has appeared in other spaces as well, including conversations around ‘world-making’, or technology which allows for ‘immersive experiences’, and, somewhat similarly to the DDS project, conversations about paradigm shifts in education that talk about a shift from taking in content to an immersive and dynamic context, which itself constitutes the educational process. Despite its appearance in some of these discourses, the word itself hasn’t received too much attention in it's own right, and the DDS project is one way to consider the concept more deeply.
What is immersion?
A standard definition of immersion is that it is a ‘state of being deeply engaged or involved’; it is sometimes literally used in reference to being ‘immersed in water’, and generally refers to some kind of deep involvement, or participation, in some kind of process. The word can be appropriately used when being ‘immersed’ in a book, a game, or culture, or other activities which demand our full attention and presence. It is also used in language studies to refer to an ‘immersive experience’ into a place that speaks a certain language that one is trying to learn; for example, one might go to Italy to get immersed into the culture so that they learn to speak better Italian.
The reason that this word has popped up in so many conversations seems to be that spaces which allow for development are necessarily immersive, and that this immersion has increasingly been viewed as an essential part of the learning process. Immersion here is a way to describe and make sense of the lived experience of a space or program, of what it is like to be deeply involved in it. A crucial component of deliberately developmental spaces, and even education more broadly, is the experience of what it is like, and what one learns from that experience. As one might expect, this shift calls into question other existing methods, which focus more on 'content' and this distinction is often quite naturally summed up by the movement from 'content' to 'context'. This emphasis on the lived experience and the dynamic context in which one is involved then becomes the source itself of a developmental or learning process.
Immersion and emergence
Etymologically speaking, it is interesting to consider for a moment how ‘immersion’ is not so different from ‘emergence’, both of which go back to the latin word “mergere” , meaning “to dip”. “Emerge” refers to the sense of “becoming known or manifest”, and in discourse around complexity science, where it is often used, ‘emergence’ refers to the somewhat mysterious phenomenon of a higher-order organization out of agents. It is compatible with the concept of self-organization, or the spontaneous ‘emergence’ or evolution of coordination in a complex adaptive system. The imagery that naturally comes to mind with ‘emergence’ is one where agents mutually create a ‘higher order’ organization, which ‘emerges’ out of their interaction.
The interesting thing here is that ‘immersion’ points to a similar process, but provides a different sort of picture. Immersion, as it has been used in some of our DDS conversations and in reference to the educational paradigm shift, has focused on how students or individuals can become meaningfully ‘immersed’ in their environment- how the context itself and the relationships in that context itself becomes the educational and transformational source of development. The imagery that ‘immersion’ suggests, and is sometimes directly referred to, is one of ‘plunging’ or going down, where one becomes entangled with the context that one is a part of, in an educational setting or in a deliberately developmental setting.
Another etymological cousin which helps unite the terms here is the word ‘merge’, meaning, to ‘unite’ or to ’combine forces’ or to ‘integrate’ or to ‘combine to form a single entity’. Indeed, one can imagine how ‘immersion’ ‘emergence’ and ‘merge’ all point to the same kind of process, whereby an agent gets deeply involved in a process to the degree in which it becomes part of that process in some mysterious, and even life affirming, way; in that immersion, new order emerges.
While one provides the image of going ‘down’ or ‘plunging in’ (immersion), another provides the image of something ‘rising up’ (emergence), and the other provides the image of 'coming together' or to 'unite' (merge). Indeed, it is a unique contrast which points to the mysterious relational capacity of life to self-organize and produce some kind of novelty in certain contexts. In other words, the three terms all point to self-organization from different perspectives: immersion, when an agent is ‘immersed’; emergence, the ‘higher order’ system which emerges out of the agents which are ‘immersed’; and merge, which points to the process more generally, how agents can synergistically move together and establish organization in some novel way. It seems at first a bit difficult to wrap one's head around, but it seems to be all there: to immerse is to merge is to emerge, in one fell swoop.
Systematic immersion
Within our DDS project, we are concerned with how ‘human agents’ become immersed in such a process, or developmental space, and what kind of affordances, challenges, experiences, and relationships are encouraged in the immersion of these different spaces, and how this contributes to development.
And so, it is worth considering different ways that ‘immersion’ might happen. Sometimes, ‘immersive experiences’ can refer to a few moments in which the virtual world seems ‘real’ due to how life-like it seems. Other examples of such momentary immersion might be observed when one is at a sports game or zoo, or even playing some kind of game, where the environment, or place, or activity, is one which demands our attention to a degree that we become ‘immersed’. In these cases, we become abiding agents to the spell of whatever the game or activity is, where our attention ‘merges’ with the activity or process in some kind of participatory way. There is a sense in which we become ‘selfless’, as who we are merges with the process we are immersed in.
In the kinds of deliberately developmental spaces in which we are studying, we are more concerned with a long term, or what might be called systematic, immersion. Systematic immersion sometimes refers to being 'systematically immersed' in a video game and knowing the rules of the game, but this doesn’t seem to capture the feeling. Instead, it might be considered as the lived experience of a prolonged entanglement in a particular space or relationship. An intuitive example of systematic immersion might be one's job, or being immersed in school, or perhaps even the relationship that one has with one’s partner. There is a sense, with systematic immersion, that it is continued and purposeful, in the sense that one must be there or deeply want to be there, for whatever reason.
Immersion and DDS
The reason that this distinction might be important is because one can then ask, what kind of relationships, possibilities, feelings arise in this space? How does this immersion have an impact on how we view ourselves and the world around us, and how might it contribute to human ‘development’? What does it mean to be systematically immersed within a space? How long does it take for it to have an impact? Can immersion effectively happen in digital spaces, or does it have to be in real life? Can a two week course have a substantial effect, or does it take months?
Additionally, it could be meaningful to point out and consider the many barriers that exist to be ‘immersed’ in a DDS. The many boundaries that exist- professional, financial, ‘educational’, and otherwise- can be demanding to the degree in which it becomes difficult to be immersed in a place where we can aim to develop meaningful capacities and cultivate being. Instead, it is easy to be immersed in other processes and spaces, which in the long term might not be all that concerned with creating a sense of meaning, development, and harmony within ourselves and the environment around us.
Whatever the case, the language of immersion seems to more accurately allow one to consider the lived experience of deliberately developmental spaces. Namely, what is it like to be immersed in one of these spaces, and in particular, what kind of feelings and possibilities emerge?
