Experiências imersivas: entre promessas comunicacionais e vivências de consumo

Abstract

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of immersive experiences in contemporary society, analyzing the relationship between communicational promises and consumer experiences at exhibitions and cultural events centered on this theme. The study is based on the assumption that experience has become a central value in the consumer economy, frequently used as a discursive and marketing strategy to attract audiences interested in sensory novelties. The objective is to understand why experience has become a sought-after social value used to sell products and services. To this end, it discusses the desire for new experiences in contemporary society through the analysis of commercial and institutional proposals for immersive experiences. It also seeks to verify to what extent the communicational promise of the experience is realized in the public’s lived experience. The research adopts a qualitative approach, combining an interdisciplinary theoretical review in the fields of Communication, Philosophy, Sociology, and Culture with empirical methods. It uses autoethnography and a protocol based on Pine and Gilmore’s (2019) Theory of the Four Realms of Experience to analyze the promise and lived experience of six immersive experiences and the mediation technologies—immediacy and hypermediation—employed. It also incorporates the flânerie technique for the attentive observation of the environments and audiences of the experiences selected between 2023 and 2025. The results indicate that, in most of the cases analyzed, the promises of immersive experiences materialize into immersive multisensory experiences for the audience, with five out of six experiences fulfilling what was previously announced and promised. The public did indeed consume the myth, converting discourses into memories and real experiences. However, an exhibition pattern with few conceptual variations was observed among the analyzed exhibitions. It is also possible to verify that immersion does not depend exclusively on the technologies employed, but on sensory and emotional engagement and the participant’s subjective willingness to interact with the content. The thesis defended here is that although the discourse of experience functions as a marketing strategy and a communicational myth, it frequently materializes into real experiences, even if embedded within the logic of the experience economy. The theoretical foundation is grounded in authors such as Aristotle (1973), Plato (1985), Kant (1988), Dewey (1929), Benjamin (1994), Han (2023), Barthes (2001), Baudrillard (1995), Gumbrecht (2006), Dubet (1996), Bondía (2002), Schmitt (2002), and Pine and Gilmore (2019), among other researchers, articulating philosophical and communicational foundations regarding experience, consumption, and immersion.