Sometimes I feel like Sancho Panza fighting the windmills. My favourite windmill being the terminology of immersionism/augmentationism. One would expect that the obvious mistake in the terminology like that one is will be cleared easily, so we can continue thinking and discussing the problem more effectively. But no, it doesn't happen.
It's not that I haven't said it loud enough and often enough. Something else is the case here.
It's not that the people who are calling themselves "immersionists" are not aware that they are augmenting themselves in virtual worlds. If you talk to them more than five minutes you'll see that augmentation is the corner stone of their existence. Same goes to the other side. As many times in history, terms are not used by the reason and logic. They are used as a tool to define tribes and make a conflict possible. They are flags. As such, they don't need to have a meaning but just a color to help differentiate "us" from "them".
Let's not lie to ourselves. That conflict is important. It, and it's outcome, defines the nature of the virtual realm we're conquering these years. And each side hopes to make it their way. Between them stands the few of us, choking in the fake definitions and wondering when will we clear the grounds and start doing some serious and useful job. But you know what's the fate of those that stands between confronted sides screaming for a bit of reason? They usually get killed in the cross-fire. Or, with a bit of luck, they keep their heads low and wait for the tribes to get tired and out of ammunition. So when they finally stop shooting nonsense around, we can take a look over the burned grounds and start repairing the damage. When will that happen?
We don't know when it will happen. But luckily, there is a bit of light on the horizon. Gwyneth Llewelyn calls it post-immersionism.
I believe that the dominant attitude will be to trust more and more what people do on the Internet (and write about themselves, and are peer-reviewed that way). We can get way more data out of the Internet about some person or some company than using any other method. In a sense, the “person” or “company” becomes the data we read about them on the Internet. And thus we’re back to the point where we started: once we cross back from the digital world into the physical world, and we begin to forge relationships on the physical world because of the ones we forged on the digital one, then we become post-immersionists: the digital world is where the focus is, the physical world — and what we do to establish relationships in the physical world — becomes less important.
It is just a matter of time. People are prone to distrust new things and their habits makes them show the lack of thinking and understanding.
While our society has fully embraced phone calls as being part of our digital self, and is slowly moving ahead to do the same with emails (specially once we can get rid of all those spammers), things like Group IM on MSN/Gtalk/Yahoo or even virtual worlds like Second Life are still too new for us to fully embrace it. But… it’ll come.
It will come. We will know that immersion is nothing more than getting the most of the virtual environment and that augmentation is the case in more than 95% of digital appearances. And that one can be both at the same time. We'll find it normal to immerse and be augmented at the same time. Because immersion is a prerequisite for the quality of the experience and the avatar, no matter how different from the human, is it's extension – augmentation.
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