Earticle

Immersion—the state of sustained cognitive and affective absorption during continuous media consumption—is a key determinant of user engagement in serialized digital content platforms. Although recommender systems mediate most user interactions in these environments, their effects on immersion remain theoretically ambiguous. Personalization reduces can search costs and promote narrative continuity, yet it may also lower switching barriers, potentially diverting attention toward alternative titles. To examine how personalization shapes immersive engagement, we conduct a large-scale field experiment on a serialized digital comics platform, comparing personalized recommendations with popularity-based displays. We measure immersion behaviorally as continuous session-level consumption within each narrative series and distinguish between the phases of initial discovery and subsequent continuation. Preliminary results suggest that personalization enhances discovery engagement but may attenuate sustained immersion during continuation, reflecting a tension between curiosity-driven exploration and narrative commitment. These findings advance understanding of recommender system research by clarifying when personalization fosters versus fragments immersion, offering both theoretical refinement and design implications for algorithmic curation in serialized media contexts.