Ethics in immersive storytelling

Within this article I’ll look at ethics from two angles:

1. How immersive storytelling can be used to communicate current ethical issues to audiences, plus the importance of using content to communicate these issues.
2. How ethics can be considered and used to inform the design and delivery of immersive products and experiences with minimal negative ethical risks.

How content can move ethical issues from fringe to mainstream discussion

Ethics and ethical decision making play a crucial role in human practice and creation.

Ethical evaluation of technology became more mainstream after the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data scandal led to widespread mainstream media coverage of many of the issues raised by these events.

Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (published January 15, 2019) armed people with terms and language to describe the economic system centred around the commodification of personal data for profit.

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal is the subject of the documentary film The Great Hack released, somewhat ironically, by the tech giant Netflix on July 24, 2019. See the trailer here:

This film presents a narrative of the scandal in an easy to understand form, and, significantly, is viewable by anyone with access to a Netflix account- some 195 million accounts as of the third quarter of 2020.

Further to this the docudrama film The Social Dilemma (released September 9th 2020 and also distributed by Netflix) highlights the societal damage caused through the rise of social media using a surveillance capitalism business model.

With this more widespread awareness of ethical issues relating to tech, consumers are becoming more aware of the tech choices they are making. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Apple who used this to emphasise a competitive advantage to end users for their products (which can afford to protect user data due to the company generating profits through device and app sales, instead of through surveillance capitalism. This is not to say that they won’t adopt surveillance capitalism some time in the future. To evidence this, see this photo of an Apple billboard advertisement I came across in Manchester, UK, November 2020:

Evidently, well-crafted content can and does get audiences asking questions they have never asked before. Highly impactful pieces can help tip topics and issues into mainstream awareness and media. The above examples relate to the medium of film, but I am very interested in how immersive media can be leveraged to engage audiences even more deeply. The technologies explored in my previous articles can be used to place a person within a piece of content, and give them some agency in that experience in order to focus their attention, and engage their thoughts and emotions in new ways. Further to this audience interaction with a piece can be used to change the narrative around the user, making the experience more unique with potential for longer lasting impact on them.

Designing with ethics- web guidelines and principles

Ethical principles and frameworks can serve as a base and guide for design decisions during content and experience design and throughout the creation process. Without an ethical starting point I think there is a real risk of building inequitable experiences.

Certain groups are publishing very useful and practical ethical guidelines, some examples that resonate with my values being;

W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles

The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a net positive social benefit. As we continue to evolve the web platform, we must therefore consider the ethical consequences of our work.

The Mozilla Manifesto lists the following 10 principles;

1. The Internet is an integral part of modern life – a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
2. The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
3. The Internet must enrich the lives of individual human beings.
4. Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
5. Individuals must have the ability to shape the Internet and their own experiences on the Internet.
6. The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralised participation worldwide.
7. Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.
8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.
9. Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

Privacy

Touching on privacy briefly here (as this is a deep subject area which warrants much more attention that I will give it now)…

An excellent conversation on the importance of online privacy in this podcast The TED Radio Hour (link to 14:40 for those with less time). Around 24:57 this succinctly articulates the concerns for marginalised groups that I have;

What privacy is about is actually power. The political argument we get is that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. […] What are rights for? If we are in a democracy a lot of people think the democracy is constituted to represent the will of the majority. The majority doesn’t really need things like privacy protections because the majority decides the things that can and cannot be said. […] The majority is never really at risk in the same way from violations of privacy. Privacy is not about something to hide, privacy is about something to protect. What you are protecting is the differences in society, because that is where we get progress from. […] But we protect that space for change, what we’re doing is we’re protecting the minority against the majority. And that is what every right accomplishes- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property. All of these things are about having something for you. […] It is recognising that you have a right to your self which society, the government, the other, your neighbour must overcome before marching you off to prison. […] Privacy is the fountainhead form which all other rights derive.

Edward Snowden

I take two main things from the above passage:

1. That any experiences I design need to, as much as possible, give the audience’s privacy utmost importance. In doing this the experiences or tools I create will better allow for marginalised peoples’ participation.
2. Immersive experiences can help communicate this topic in new and novel ways to audiences, for example by placing them at the centre of a story.

With new technology comes new ethical risks

In Kent Bye’s presentation of his XR Ethics Manifesto at Greenlight’s XR Strategy Conference on October 18, 2019, he describes how they brainstormed around 75 different ethical and moral dilemmas of mixed reality. I think it’s crucial to give these thought and consideration when creating stories and immersive experiences.

You can watch Kent’s presentation in full in the following video;

One issue that comes with immersive and mixed reality technology is that there is a lot more personal data being collected and used by devices and services. Some examples of this being user height, gait, point clouds of users’ homes, limb lengths, and soon (highly likely) eye tracking. With this there is greater potential for both negative and positive uses. So ethically speaking it’s important that this data is handled securely and used for the good of the audience.

Kent’s presentation serves as a useful starting point for people designing and producing mixed reality experiences. It’s very important to design and build with these points in mind at this early stage of the mixed reality industry- by making well thought through ethical choices now, there is potential for exponential positive influences over time- potentially reducing future Cambridge Analytica-like scandals.

We’re still in a position to intervene in the development process, instead of attempting to retrofit ethical decisions into an established design. […] This [immersive web] space is a challenge and an opportunity.

Diane Hosfelt 2019

Permaculture ethics

Permaculture is a design science that is being adopted around the world and applied in fields including regenerative agriculture, community resilience, rewilding and eco-social change. It’s built on three foundational ethics;

1. Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
2. Care of people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence
3. Setting limits to population and to consumption. By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles.

(Mollison 1988)

In recent projects I have been applying permaculture principles to the evaluation, choice and design of technology to support eco-social impact groups and projects- assessing the environmental, energy and social impacts of our choices in these areas.

To me it seems that the second ethic; care of people, is, as a result of the points mentioned earlier in this article, entering mainstream discussions and beginning to influence consumer choices, policy making and some business’ focus.

What I feel is a necessary next step is the popularisation of the first ethic; care of the Earth. There is already a large focus on the climate crisis, but I think many feel disempowered to make positive change themselves. What I think is required is a conscious shift towards individuals making changes in all aspects of their lives, coupled with greater cooperation across our species.

Some immersive experiences aim to do this by connecting people to nature in new and novel ways, an example being Treehugger VR installation by Marshmallow Laser Feast (2016) where;

Participants are invited to don a VR headset, place their heads into the tree’s knot and be transported into the Sequoia’s secret inner world. The longer you hug the tree, the deeper you drift into ‘treetime’: a hidden dimension that lies just beyond the limit of our senses. Audiences embark on a journey of abstract visualisation, following a single drop of water as it traverses from root to canopy in these enormous living structures.

Marshmallow Laser Feast. You can watch the trailer in this video:

This kind of content interests me very much, as I think the effect of embodiment in an audience is made possible through immersive technologies.

Conclusions

Ethics need to guide the immersive and spatial industry as it navigates it’s ‘early days’. Ethics as an area is quite a challenge to approach, and I feel that immersive technologies can be used to better help people learn about and understand the importance of different perspectives on various ethical issues. The popularisation of the implications of ethics is essential in order to change consumer and voter behaviour and choices for the good of themselves, and all the fauna and flora of the world.

Further to this, when developing immersive stories ethical considerations should be present at all stages… from idea inception through technology choices and data handling, to audience onboarding, experience and debriefing. This contributes to making an experience that can be used by as wide and varied an audience as possible. This isn’t to say that all the fun should be removed from experience design by a strict set of rules, but that moral principles can and should steer a project.

References

Diane Hosfelt May 2019 ‘Making ethical decisions for the immersive web’. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.06995

Diane Hosfelt Making ethical decisions for the immersive web https://blog.mozvr.com/making-ethical-decisions/

Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

Mollison, Bill (1988). Permaculture: a Designer’s Manual. Tagari Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-908228-01-0.

XR Ethics: An XR Ethics Manifesto https://voicesofvr.com/844-xr-ethics-an-xr-ethics-manifesto/

XR Ethics Manifesto (UPDATED Nov 2, 2019) from Kent Bye