Jargogled Impressions.

David Sedaris talks about immersion in the context of language learning. By surrounding yourself with a completely alien language where there’s no falling back on your native / mother tongue, you can pick up language skills faster than relying on traditional classroom conversations. Immersion as a metaphor for cultural learning is interesting because it suggests that an unfamiliar culture can sometimes feel like a dense fog or pool of fluid that you are not generally accustomed to. Much like when you learn swimming and the idea of breathing inside water feels like being plucked out of your natural habitat and dropped into a hostile territory where normal rules don’t apply. Deep immersion, for swimming, implies being one with this new environment. As my swimming instructor used to coach me – “think of it as a walk-in-the-park as opposed to a violent thrashing in an oxygen less world”. Deep immersion for a new culture implies diving into the deeper contours of a culture to really understand the history and the eons of evolution that has gone into the making of that culture.

Immersion implies commitment and an affinity for uncertainty. It involves jumping head-first into a pool of water with no inkling of where the floor is. It’s depriving oneself of the familiar spaces and feeling your movements in the blankness that results therein. Language is but a medium for breathing and communicating culture. Learning the medium is therefore linked inextricably with understanding the context and the compounds that make up this territory.

Culture as a term originates from the Latin word Colere meaning to tend and to cultivate. Beginning its journey as an agricultural metaphor related to tending to the soil, and then to personal growth, the term expanded its girth by attempting to describe the very fabric of the society and its level of sophistication. As different societies clashed, the pervasion of culture as an identity led to its natural evolution as a barometer of progress and of superiority and eventually as a class-divider. Little wonder that culture, in its evolved avatar assumed tiered attributes for the continent, the nation, the society, the community, the mind, and to the faculties. As a metaphor therefore, “immersion in a local culture” identifies culture in its broader appeal. As a field of study, socio-cultural, archaeological, biological, linguistic anthropology awards culture its wide-angled pedestal.

Our actions today are driven by a need to take far greater control of our fate that any of our ancestors had even imagined. We are actively seeking ways to be in the driver seat of our own lives and be accountable for its failures and its achievements. Controlling the cultural symphony we are exposed to is a core tenet of how we are trying to design our own world better. As with core science experiments, adopting the right culture is very important for our own experiments in the real world. How often do we think about designing and creating a culture that is unique to us and to our aspirations? Tending to also imply a sense of personal agency involved in reaching the pinnacle of human development. Likewise, in the pathology, you test for foreign pathogens or their habitat / ecosystem by designing cultures appropriate for such tests and ins a controlled environment, your culture supports or invalidates your hypothesis.

Fast forward 50 years from today when Ready Player One may be just a MVP relic of the virtual reality world we will come to inhabit. How would the culture evolve when we get there and literally immerse ourselves in the world that we have designed from scratch? To put it mildly, how would we respond to a world where our dreams and physical reality coalesce into one and alters our perception of time and space? When we think about the patterns of behavior humans have developed, our ability to find meaning in the things that we observe and feel around us, and in the tools (language, behaviors, signals) we use to pass on cultural artefacts, we will be witnessing a seismic shift in how we interact with others and with the world around us. In effect, the culture we know of and call the “human cultural norm” will cease to exist.

Popular culture, sub-culture, counter-culture are offshoots or children of broader cultures with more distinct and localized spatial (national), societal (religion), and species (homo sapiens) attributes. By definition, a popular culture is ephemeral and does not immediately translate to an abiding cultural system. Sub-culture and counter-culture bear smaller footprints and are indistinguishable from the longer narrative of cultural evolution because they precede or challenge cultural norms only to eventually assimilate into an existing cultural wave or vanish altogether from cultural zeitgeist. What starts off as a deviant behavior (sub/counter) eventually morphs into either an aberration or a persistent attempt at self-identification.

Taking control of our own fate through modulating our own culture sometimes takes the form of deliberately embracing distinct sub-cultures, often driven by herd mentality and a desire to belong. Associating oneself with a sub-culture involves investment in understanding the lingua franca of that culture and attempting to be accepted into a normally evasive and hostile group of people who prefer to associate their culture as one with themselves, and thus distinct from the cultural norm. Most sub-cultures die and a few become big enough to be assimilated into the cultural norm. The velocity and intensity of scale that a specific sub-culture can shepherd determines whether it perishes or emerges as a challenger to the established norms. Most originate as a challenger to default norms aiming to replace or change them. A few originate as pure hobbies and means of self-identification with scant functional or objective purpose and they primarily succumb to changing tides or get absorbed by a larger more dominant cultural predator.

Immersion in a sub-culture is a huge investment. A cinematic medium, a music tradition, a writing style, an ideological echo-chamber, a NIMBY community, or a philosophical ethos, there are a plethora of sub-cultures to choose from and associate oneself to. A complete immersion is a gambit. Without it, the flow and the walk-in-the-park will never materialize. But with it, you may end up associating yourself with your perceived (and likely false) identity. Immersion, in these cases, may end up with drowning in an alien environment where you may know how to breathe but you don’t really want to.