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Turning Point: Emerging Media and Social Justice Philanthropy

By Cara Mertes, Director, JustFilms, Creativity and Free Expression, Ford Foundation

“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 and director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab Programs.

Her recent report, Making A New Reality, maps the landscape for emerging media, including immersive media such as virtual reality, augmented reality, 360 degree storytelling, hyper-reality and more. It extends to also look 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.

This expansive reflection will continue to be released over the next six months on Immerse, covering many of the 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. The forthcoming recommendations lay the groundwork 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.

Making A New Reality is one of several recent initiatives and projects being funded by Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, which supports creative moving image storytellers and the organizations and networks that enable their work. Exploratory funding has focused on three integrated components over the last two years:

• 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 tech-enabled 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 time for social justice philanthropy to engage with emerging media? The field is young, access for creators is extremely limited, adoption rates for audiences are projected to soar, and emerging media will be a site of convergence for all of Ford’s Creativity and Free Expression(CFE) fields: creative documentary forms (JustFilms), journalism, and the arts.

CFE’s overarching priorities guided the effort:

• Ensuring greater access to making and using socially engaged content for both creators and audiences from traditionally underserved backgrounds and perspectives;
• Supporting more sustainable, equitable and inclusive ecosystems in CFE’s fields.

The current explorations were designed to inquire into each of these areas in emerging media.

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 theatre 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 next generations of experience.

One of the differences between film and immersive media is that one is external, and the other seeks to trick the mind into thinking it is an experience internal to the body and mind. Cinema is outside the body. Immersive media are trying 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 lay 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 could potentially unlock a greater willingness to engage in problem solving, and was seen to 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, which is now unfolding.

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 has developed a remarkable capacity for holding contradictory impulses. Violence and generosity 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 and implement 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 recent 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. 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?

What the independent film movement can teach us now

Coming from a background in independent media and the arts, this moment strikes me as one akin to the early years of the independent media movement in America. The invention of portable video technology catalyzed new story forms (video art, reality TV, video journalism) and created new audiences. Its affordability and accessibility democratized access to the means of production. The subsequent independent media field that formed was dynamic and powerful in its critique of the failings of a media system organized around marketplace incentives that saw viewers as consumers, not citizens. Independent documentary in particular was rooted in a commitment to critiquing power structures, validating underrepresented perspectives, and revealing abuse, corruption and exploitation.

Contained in the decades of extraordinary documentaries and media initiatives that ensued is a story of this country’s struggles against injustice and exclusionary policies, values and beliefs. From Fred Wiseman’s 50-year project of documentation of American institutions, to the Eyes on the Prize series — which ushered in an era of television histories from more inclusive points of view — independent media has redefined the American experience for generations. Now we are in yet another golden age of documentary artistry, shown on public media and cable, Netflix and Amazon, with a treasure trove of films and episodic documentary linked to broader efforts to build dignified and complex representations of contemporary reality.

But with all of its success in creating a vital source of counter-narratives to those dictated by commercial and other powerful interests, independent media’s Achilles heel was, and still is, its lack of diversity in voice and story. Transforming this status quo in film, arts and journalism is a central tenet of Ford’s strategy through Creativity and Free Expression, and emerging media is no exception.

Can society afford to repeat the same mistake in the 21st century, with the next era of digital story experiences in development, just as a retreat from democracy is sweeping the globe? Now, in the early years of immersive media, at a time when inequality is growing exponentially, philanthropy could be poised to provide the crucial initial funding that allows a diverse and creative field of practice to grow.

This is the moment for greater foundation investment

The speed and scale of the transformation in the story landscape is breathtaking. Sinclair’s report, Making A New Reality, details 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,” she writes. “This will help to mitigate the pitfalls of disruption and potentially usher in a change that has justice and equity as core values,” she writes.

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?

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 two labs being supported by JustFilms provide opportunities for artists of color in Canada and the U.S., and in Africa to experiment with immersive storytelling and share what they’re learning with the field.

• In 2016, six Canadian indigenous artists joined six artists of color from the American South in the first Open Immersion Lab. Over 10 days, they generated a ground-breaking set of VR prototypes stemming from deeply discussed questions around who represents which stories from what perspective, and how the experience of the story source is honored. This partnership with the National Film Board of Canada and the Canadian Film Center will continue with writings, presentations and a further set of experimentation as a second year unfolds.
• Electric South | New Dimensionis taking a different tack. Taking place outside of Capetown, South Africa, in 2017, 10 African artists joined a set of mentors to conceptualize VR projects that break the boundaries of conventional VR practice. Coming from fashion, sculpture, journalism, film and poetry, these creators were invited to experiment with radically re-centered approaches rooted in celebrations of reimagined worlds and the power of radical imaginaries, as well as drawing from experiences of exclusion and injustice. The sketches that emerged ranged from Afro-futuristic to poetry-infused experiences to game-based immersion.

In content funding, the Emmy-Award winning VR Collisions, by Lynette Wallworth, 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. Walworth, who is premiering the JustFilms-supported Awavena at Sundance 2018 and at Davos 2018, says of VR, “The technologies are not superior, they are adequate vessels to hold the seed of complex world views, synthesized into a digital drama, as a real attempt at connection, illumination, and in the hope of effecting real world change.”

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 will be the subject of a convening and research report in 2018, currently titled Collective Wisdom. Authors Katerina Cizek, William Uricchio and Sarah Wolozin have so far conducted more than 40 interviews and in the process developed a taxonomy of co-creation, spanning from community-centered co-creation to humans with machine learning and biotech hybrids.

Cizek asks, “How can media makers work with citizens, communities, scholars, technologists and machines to not only interpret the world but change it? How is co-creation understood and defined across disciplines from documentary, journalism and humanities to technology and industrial design?” The report will provide case studies of initiatives such as the Detroit Narrative Agency, another effort supported by JustFilms, as it examines the emerging arena at the nexus of film/narrative, community co-creation, civic strengthening and the human-machine interface.

Furthering inclusion, creativity and experimentation

Ford Foundation is just one funder exploring this arena from a social justice perspective. Beyond the work in CFE, its Internet Freedom area is focused on digital rights and public technology infrastructure. 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 like 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. As 2018 unfolds and the convergence of film, the arts, journalism, and other forms of expression and technology accelerates, JustFilms and Ford Foundation will continue to build new field knowledge and share findings about the promise and peril of emerging media.

Thanks to Kamal Sinclair, Jessica Clark, Kat Cizek, Sarah Wolozin and Salome Asega for their contributions and rigorous review, and to my JustFilms colleagues Chi-hui Yang and Andrew Catauro for their insights and efforts with these experiments.

The Making a New Reality research project is authored by Kamal Sinclair with support from the Ford Foundation JustFilms program and supplemental support from the Sundance Institute. Learn more about the goals and methods of this research, who produced it, and the interviewees whose insights inform the analysis.

Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.

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