In her piece, “Aesthetics
and Immersion: Reflections on Martin Jay’s Essay "Diving into the Wreck,” Margaret Morse situates metaphorical associations with the term “immersion” against the metaphorical construction of “contemplation”. She perceives immersion and contemplation to be relatively contrastive (as metaphors for spectatorship), and takes issue with Jay’s concretely literal approach in his analysis. She asserts that, “[he does not] distinguish between the virtual and the physical or between a cultural apparatus designed to produce a state of
mind called “immersion” and the actual experience of spectators, who may or may not be drawn under the waves” (3). She is responding to Jay in a manner seeking to contribute to the discussion about mass immersion as intrinsically escapist
versus immersive practices as being culturally beneficial. 

Jay attributes the
systematic disintegration of “reality” with the immersion of mass culture via
popular entertainment outlets; he condemns immersion as cultural absorption, whereas Morse seems to adopt a stance of technological optimism and cultural conviction. Immersive environments are metaphorically likened to large bodies
of water, where the surface of said body can be understood as an interface (4).
In regards to this metaphorical understanding of immersion, Morse concludes, “…the seductive power of the interface can have entirely different psychic roots—the will-to-know an alien world or will-to-power over the other, for example. The resulting split-consciousness or the state of mind called “immersion” thus serves mixed ends,
cognitive and emotional. Though immersion is empathic in putting oneself
virtually or actually into alien point-of-view, it need not entail
sympathy—seeing as is not necessarily seeing with” (5). Immersion and sympathetic behavior are by no means mutually exclusive, according to Morse’s understanding; it seems as though she frames sympathetic tendencies within immersive virtual realities as being generated by choice or circumstance, and not inherent to the process of becoming immersed. The split-consciousness that she describes lends itself to a deeper philosophical investigation of the relationship that actually exists between consciousness and the brain, and how one’s initial instincts might tempt him or her to concretely separate the mental realm from the material, physical realm (whereas Marx and the notion of historical materialism would dictate that consciousness is actively shaped by physicality and the environment).

Morse argues that immersion can be regarded not only as a
literal state of mental being, but also identified
as a temporary, mediated, and entirely transitional phenomenon; it should be
recognized as a societally beneficial alternative to other mind altering
processes (she uses drug addiction as an example of an unhealthy process). She believes that the act of relinquishing disbelief actually constitutes the
reality (or relative unreality) of a simulation, with interactive games experienced as “highly-rendered figurative
3-D computer graphic worlds” serving as an example for media forms, which
induce mental absorption of sorts. She states, “…a contemporary immersive
fiction such as virtual reality seems to put us ‘inside’ the screen or virtual scene…immersion, in this context
conveys the state of being totally inside a created world both virtually and
emotionally”(5). Immersive practices as a means of perception is another crucial aspect of the argument
Morse is making in regards to the relationship between the state of the mind
and the state of the body; it is not entirely preposterous to consider that the
human tendency towards framing (read as “choosing”) the way we experience
certain elements of reality is another form of virtuality in itself. There
might not be a definitive mode of induction, nor an explicit separation of the
real and the constructed, but Morse asserts, “…that we are nonetheless
‘framed,’ if not by the fiction ‘container’ in which we are moving” (5). The
novel Ender’s Game is used as an
example of essentially failing to understand the container one finds himself
in, and mistaking it for an entirely different container (to somewhat tragic
ends). Does immersion ultimately facilitate transparency, to a degree? And is this transparency dangerous to the individual, or psychologically beneficial in his or her interaction with the virtual?

1. Drama, Brecht, and Alienation
2. "eXistenZ," Galloway, and Virtual Immersion