"Cyberspace: What is immersion, after all?"
Bruce Sterling, in the introduction to his 1992 non-fiction book "The Hacker Crackdown", describes cyberspace, coined by his fellow cyberpunk writer William Gibson, as: "Cyberspace is the 'place' where a telephone conversation appears to occur." He goes further and clarifies: "Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones."
Since then, cyberspace has been used as a catch-all buzzword for communications using a computer-mediated environment. These are made in a disembodied way, with a constant "suspension of disbelief", or even, in the words of Gibson, "a hallucinatory collective experience".
However, "immersion" predates computers and even technology! Let's look at some examples.
Come and discuss later today at Pip Torok CC
