By Cara Mertes, Project Director,
Moving Image Strategies, International Programs, Ford Foundation
Now is the time for social justice philanthropy to engage with emerging media
From late 2017 through mid-2018, Kamal Sinclair mapped the landscape for emerging media with her research on Making A New Reality (makinganewreality.org). In this foreword, Cara Mertes of the Ford Foundation, which funded this project, points out that advances in immersive narrative are reshaping the landscape of storytelling. Immersive media can bring people closer together across faith, race, class, gender, ability, and caste — or it can divide us. Mertes urges other funders to join Ford in supporting social justice initiatives for emerging media.
“Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating system.
Emerging media cannot risk limited inclusion and suffer the same pitfalls of
traditional media. The stakes are too high…” This is just one of the compelling
insights noted by Kamal Sinclair, a leading emerging media expert. When I first
commissioned her research for the influential Making a New Reality study, she
was directing Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab Programs. Now, she’s the
executive director of the Guild of Future Architects, an ambitious community
of people incubating collaborations that prototype bold ideas about the future
from an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens.
Published from late 2017 through mid-2018, Making A New Reality
(makinganewreality.org)mapped the landscape for emerging media, including
immersive media such as virtual reality, augmented reality, 360 degree storytelling, hyper-reality, and more. With lead pieces on Immerse and supporting
articles at makinganewreality.org, it also looked at the impact of artificial intelligence,
ambient data, wired environments, and biomedia in the storytelling
landscape. It is an unparalleled resource, culled from more than 100 interviews
and research across the field.
Sinclair addressed current debates in emerging media against a backdrop of
changing business models, creative experimentation and millions of dollars
of investment in both content creators and tech platforms such as Oculus and
Magic Leap. She then offered recommendations for the interventions social
justice philanthropy and other donors/investors can consider as tech-enabled
creative and immersive storytelling catapults toward becoming the dominant
story experience for Generation Z and beyond.
Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating
system. Emerging media cannot risk limited inclusion
and suffer the same pitfalls of traditional media.
The stakes are too high.
Making A New Reality is one of several exploratory initiatives I funded while I was directing Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, in order to build a foundation for emerging media practices. While JustFilms primarily supports creative nonfiction storytellers and the organizations and networks that enable their work, I thought it valuable as part of the portfolio to put a limited portion of the available funding towards incubating related work that could potentially strengthen the overall impact of Ford Foundation’s moving image strategies. Mapping the
emerging media landscape through a justice lens was one such effort.
From 2017–2019, funding focused on three integrated components:
- Research into and analysis of new forms in emerging media, their economies, structures and blindspots, and recommendations for interventions
by social justice philanthropy; - Access to experimentation for artists of color and socially engaged artists to develop new frameworks, languages and agendas for the present and future of digital storytelling, and
- Content funding for immersive story experiments rooted in and/or co-created by community members adversely impacted by inequality.
Why is now the right moment for social justice philanthropy to engage with emerging media? The field is young, access for creators is extremely limited, and adoption rates for audiences are projected to soar, making immersive media highly influential in reinforcing narratives that undergird political and social
realities. Emerging media is a site of convergence for all expressive forms, including film, journalism, and the broader arts, as well as being a potentially useful approach for Ford’s full suite of social justice strategies.
Immersive media in its infancy
The advances in designing immersive narrative experiences are swiftly reshaping the landscape of storytelling at a level and pace unseen since the invention of the moving image. More than 120 years ago, cinematic technology
emerged and developed into a remarkably intimate yet crowd-based narrative experience through the projection of images and sound on a large screen. This appealed to the imagination and emotions of viewers in ways that had not been achieved before.
Cinema did not replace the previously dominant story technology, the book, but moving-image storytelling became ascendent in the 20th century. The screens have changed over time, as has the pre-eminence of the theatrical experience in favor of individual viewing on smaller screens. But the grammar of moving image storytelling has largely been codified.
With the evolution of the digital age comes a new frontier of immersive expression, already proving potent in ways that humans haven’t experienced before, according to research at Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab. And the development of its language, aesthetics and politics is still forming.
It is early days now for immersive media, and though it is a moving image storytelling approach, emerging media can be seen as a related but distinct field of practice where cinema, journalism, sculpture, performance, visual arts, radio, music and theater all can provide inspiration, and coding is the new architecture. The experience of VR or AR is still clunky, inelegant and messy — all hallmarks of its emergent status — but the field is evolving quickly, and the short-form experiences being created today are experiments searching for the theory and practice that will inform future generations of experience.
One of the differences between film and immersive media is that film is external
to the body, and the other seeks to trick the mind into thinking it is an internalized experience, more like a memory than a stimulus. Immersive media aim to transport your mind and body into another world that feels real, engaging all human senses, essentially comprising an alternative experience of reality in a digitally coded environment. The effect of these new approaches on humans is not well-understood yet, though research points to its powerful stimulation effects in the brains of people experiencing immersive media, particularly in VR. This has been convincing enough that NGOs, and most famously, the United Nations, began using VR in 2015 with Clouds Over Sidra. More experiments have followed, and VR has attracted those trying to relay the importance of pressing contemporary issues, such as forced immigration and other humanitarian crises.
The attraction of social justice-oriented organizations to the technology lies in
its novelty, efficiency and potential impact. In a short amount of time, VR seemed capable of introducing viewers more actively into new environments where they could better simulate the experience of “being there.” A more authentic immersive narrative experience seemed to help users identify better with the
realities of other people. It promised to create a feeling of connectedness and thereby elicit sympathy, empathy, and even compassion. For organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and the UN, this promised to unlock a greater willingness to engage in problem solving, and helped increase donation levels at events featuring VR. It was initially understood as a new, more powerful “empathy machine,” adapted from critic Roger Ebert, who once described cinema in these terms.
With such a potentially transformative set of story technologies under development taking this turn toward social justice causes, it was time to learn and experiment. Drawing from analyses across documentary, the arts and journalism, it was immediately clear that the lack of any kind of diversity across the supply chain of immersive media was a red flag. The continuing consolidation of a lucrative field by men was in danger of being repeated, and needed recognition and recommendations for transformation moving forward.
Querying the relations of power and privilege in the process of immersive storymaking and distribution was another area of focus, as was a better understanding of the narrative frameworks and strategies that are becoming accepted. The impact of these experiences on individual and societal values, beliefs, and actions over time is key. Finally, importing the attention-based commercial business models of the first generation of moving-image story approaches — film, TV, and video journalism — a path followed by social media giants, could guarantee that a crisis in diversity in immersive media would be dwarfed by the larger challenge to democracy itself, a global crisis which continues to unfold.
The human paradox and storytelling
Immersive media is in its “shiny new toy” phase, and there are those who believe it will change the world for the better by bringing people closer together across faith, race, class, gender, ability, and caste. Some hope it will potentially dissolve “othering” by tapping into the human ability to create common cause across divides. And there is evidence to support immersive media’s capacity to stimulate powerful reactions and emotions.
But as with everything human, what is life-enhancing can also be life threatening. Homo sapiens have developed a remarkable capacity for holding contradictory impulses. Capacities for violence and sustenance exist side by side in every person.
People’s ability to rationalize such divergent behavior is supported by the worldview and value systems we architect through our cultural practices; our traditions, customs, rules and norms. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remarked on this: “If only there were evil people out there, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were just simple — we could separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart.”
The stories we tell ourselves in part work to relieve the sometimes unbearable contradiction of the human condition, which is defined by capacities for compassion and cruelty in equal measure. With human nature so contradictory, it follows that human inventions, which are intended for good outcomes, also yield the opposite. Note virtual reality philosopher Jaron Lanier’s insight in a New York Times interview: “The whole internet thing was supposed to create the world’s best information resource in all of history. Everything would be made visible. And instead we are living in a time of total opacity where you don’t know why you see the news that you see…You don’t know who has paid to change what you see.”
The world is only beginning to see how dangerous this inversion from transparency to opacity will be as inequality grows exponentially. This same question is paramount as immersive story technologies become more sophisticated. Making A New Reality asks: How can society be mindful in the design phase to create the most inclusive, thoughtful and community-centered approaches, rather than relying solely on traditional for-profit and scaling models of tech development?
This is the moment for greater foundation investment
The speed and scale of the transformation in the story landscape is breathtaking. Making A New Reality detailed how we are at a prime moment of intervention with the next wave of new story technologies: “It is imperative that we
engineer robust participation of people from a broad set of communities, identity groups, value systems, and fields of knowledge in this emerging media landscape, in all roles and levels of power,” Sinclair writes. “This will help to mitigate the pitfalls of disruption and potentially usher in a change that has justice and equity as core values.”
How can structural inequities be addressed earlier in the immersive story industry and its spaces of experimentation? What are the changes we must strive for in the business model itself in order to attain greater equity and inclusion in decision-making? If our efforts are toward greater justice, what are the most fruitful story-centered strategies for transforming unjust conditions?
Ford Foundation is just one funder exploring this arena from a social justice perspective. Peer funders, including the Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, are also actively supporting research and initiatives in emerging media fields such as journalism, as they develop and adopt immersive media approaches. For this field of emerging media to grow with equity and inclusion as a central commitment, support can be scaled or more limited and targeted. It can range from funding content production to platform innovation, to education, mentorship and visibility opportunities, to developing relevant critical analysis and curatorial expertise, or a mix of these, as Ford has done.
Community-based foundations and local funders could also have a chance to bring these groundbreaking experiences to their own backyards. It bears remembering that foundations and other patrons have supported artists, journalists and documentarians in creating many of the forms that now feed into immersive storytelling, as well as socially relevant digital productions and “tech for good” initiatives. Supporting scholars, publications, and others who are tracking emerging media can also make clear not just the potential of these technologies, but the dangers: How they are used for repression, surveillance, or propaganda, how we risk losing privacy and control over our own data and networks.
So, this is only the next phase of existing philanthropic practices. Traditional narrative practice such as documentary has long been aligned with grassroots advocacy and direct action. While emerging media may seem elite and abstract right now, these new forms are becoming mainstreamed, and have the potential to catalyze change on the ground and influence thought and policy leaders in ways that bring more resources to bear on urgent social issues.
Creating access for content makers in this moment just before mass audiences adopt these new storytelling technologies is crucial to the development of the aesthetic language itself, as well as fueling a subsequent critical discourse that is centered squarely in building a more inclusive and equitable body of commentary that adds to the larger discussions.
The Making a New Reality initiative joined a number of other projects supported during my time at JustFilms which were designed to do just that. These included two labs that provide opportunities for artists of color in Canada and the U.S. The Open Immersion Lab, a partnership between the National Film Board of Canada and the Canadian Film Center, and Electric South | New Dimensions, based in Capetown, South Africa. In content funding, the Emmy Award winning VR Collisions, by Lynette Wallworth as well as her subsequent award-winning project, Awavena, and Unrest, by Jennifer Brea, use VR less to disseminate information-based stories. Rather, each artist sees VR as a site where mythology, the imaginary, and the psychological meet the real world in journeys across time and space.
Continuing to combine research with practice, the results of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab’s deep foray into co-creation and its implications for community-based storytelling in both traditional and immersive practices has been the subject of a convening and research report published in 2019, titled Collective Wisdom, led by co-authors Katerina Cizek, William Uricchio and Sarah Wolozin. Like Making a New Reality, this report has been serialized and expanded at Immerse.news, and is designed to open up dialogue about new nonfiction forms and provide a critical take on the often hype-filled discussions about the promise of technology.
Now, we hope that this toolkit will travel even further out, beyond the often-cloistered environments of film festivals and universities, and into the field where new media forms are being forged.