Immersed In Immersion

This week I wanted to follow on from last week. Purely because last week was just not a good enough rant. It was a fine rant, don’t get me wrong. It just needed something more. So this week I bring you ‘Last week’s rant 2! The sequel!... This time it’s personal’.

I want to touch on immersion. Specifically immersion in new media. I may even dabble in experiential advertising but that is a big may. When I talk about immersion I don’t mean the people who play grand theft auto and then go out, steal a car, have sex with a hooker, and then kill her to get their money back. I don’t even mean the LARPers (Live Action Role Players) out there who dress up in ye olde clothes and yell spells at each other. I mean YOU! Yeah, that made you feel uncomfortable, confrontational self-reflexivity all up in your grill.

What I mean by this is that you sir or madame, are immersed. That is to say that you are immersed in technology and all it’s wonderful benefits and opportunities (to exploit you). How long have you spent on Facebook today? How long have you spent checking your phone? How long have you spent doing other random shit on the internet? Long story short, where the fuck do our lives go? I mean, I was thinking the other day, where is the line?

In our parents day (rady fuckin raaa we all know they didn’t have technology Hugh) Now you can’t do anything without it involving some sort of technology. Unless of course it’s something that doesn’t involve technology but those things are usually A) Boring, B) Healthy, and C) Boring. Back in the day there would have been a clear division between what you did with your day and how you did it. Now you just use technology to escape life, and life to escape technology. Can you see where I’m going here?

One day I’m going to walk in to class, and forget who everyone is in there. I’m then going to have to whip out my phone, go on Facebook, and scan through my friends till I find photos that identify them because I will be so deep in this fuckin rabbit hole they call technology to even think about the biological world we actually live in (unless it is integrated into technology in which case we are doomed, possibly by robot zombies).

Sometimes I just can’t see the difference between e-consequences and real life consequences. On the internet I could say fuck you motherfucker and you’re ugly as mother, who you beat. And they would prroooobably reply saying ‘lolololol you used the wrong ‘your’ what a retard *insert racial slur* go have sex with men’ Which for me, at least, I can deal with. In real life, hey, who knows, but I’m 90% sure my gangly frame would get the crap beaten out of it. But I would still feel inclined to say it.

I can't tell if that is just the anarchy in me wanting to slip out or maybe technology has blurred the line so much that it loosely resembles a smudge that could possibly once have been a line, but you couldn’t really say for sure. But if it is anarchy. I know it was technology that put it there.

Cheers.

P.S. experiential advertising is advertising you experience.