“The moral dilemma and limitation of CVR texts in expressing trauma and memory”
When watching some CVR texts, I often feel a strong emotional impact. However, after watching, I have to think about whether this emotional participation, which is far beyond other media texts, has ethical issues. Combined with the relevant literature I have read, I summarized these moral and ethical issues.
The first is the ethics of forced empathy and emotional manipulation. Many people believe that VR technology allows us to read the world from the perspective of others, and VR's immersive technology makes it "the empathy machine" (Schlembach and Clewer, 2021, p828). Schlembach and Clewer believe that the strong emotional response produced by VR is separated from ideology. "If we conceive of the production of affective encounters as attempts to by-pass cognitive faculties, discursive practices or political deliberation, such an effort has a distinctly manipulative side to it" (2021, p831). When reading CVR texts related to trauma and memory, if we are only immersed in emotional participation, but lack thinking and ideological understanding of the content of the text, we cannot truly understand trauma and memory.
The second is the neglect of political context. Gillespie (2020) believes that the immersive characteristics of VR are two-sided, "both as a tool for emotionally engaging audience’s with social issues around the world, but also as a mechanism of increased atomisation from those issues as aspects of political discourse" .Virtual reality films are used by humanitarian organizations to promote fundraising and actions, but this emotional manipulation may ignore the broader political and social context. Gillespie said that these non-governmental organizations and charities are not neutral territories (2020, p153). This means that these texts may be political, and they may be ideologically infiltrated through emotional participation. The politics of technology has also been criticized, especially in terms of who can access this technology and who controls these narratives. The consumption and production of VR technology are controlled by wealthy countries in the northern hemisphere (Gillespie, 2020, p153). Therefore, although the image is about the Third World, the Third World still lacks the right to speak on the text. This may lead to the reproduction of global inequality.
Children from the Third World(2014) Source:https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kolkata-october-26-girl-child-brick-279510818?consentChanged=true
The third point is the illusion of "knowing" and the neglect of reality. In CVR texts of trauma and memory, the audience is sometimes allowed to get close to and show specific local details to create an illusion of "knowing" (Gruenewald and Witteborn, 2022, p147). Strong emotional involvement gives the audience an illusion that they really feel the feelings of the agent. However, this empathy without thinking and deep understanding is an illusion. In order to give the audience a pleasant viewing experience, the plot sometimes includes a plot in which the audience helps a group. By helping the victims in the text, the audience gets satisfaction through false self-moral improvement, but in fact ignores the real needs and real predicament of the victims.
The fourth point is to simplify the narrative. Suzuki believes that many such trauma texts use children as agents and story protagonists. The purpose is to arouse the audience's sympathy. This makes the image of the victim idealized under the demand of film and television (Suzuki, 2022, p1270; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014). However, the image of the victim is not singular, ideal, or perfect. For example, in the text about refugee trauma, Suzuki suggested that the audience "humanizing approaches based on a logic of inclusion ultimately affirm the colonial and racial hierarchy of humanity. There is a need to move away from strategies of humanisation and towards thinking about displacement relationally that is grounded in a politics of location" (Suzuki, 2022, p1270). In addition, I think the simplified narrative is also reflected in the fact that due to existing production technology or market reasons, CVR texts about trauma and memory are very short compared to traditional movies. In more than ten minutes or even a few minutes, the audience can only focus on emotional participation and lack rational thinking.
Finally, a study by the Stanford Media Institute showed that emotional participation has a negative impact on memory performance. The study used an immersive virtual environment (IVE) in which participants were educated on energy conservation information related to environmental protection. Subsequently, they completed a memory task on water conservation principles. The experiment included two memory tests: free recall and cued recall. Participants' sense of presence was measured by questionnaire (Bailey, Bailenson, Won, Flora, and Armel, 2012). High sense of presence may occupy too many cognitive resources, causing viewers to perform poorly in subsequent memory tasks (Bailey, Bailenson, Won, Flora, and Armel, 2012). This suggests that in texts expressing trauma and memory, excessive emotional involvement may weaken the audience's memory of the content, which is not conducive to the expression of trauma and memory. I think the meaning of understanding trauma and memory and thinking about them is far greater than emotional involvement, which is just experience but not empathy. Therefore, we need to be wary of the loss of memory of the content caused by excessive emotional involvement.
Nevertheless, the audience's moral relationship with the film is not completely inferior to the thinking of the band's narrative ethical content, but also depends on how the film can generate new meanings (Daniel, 2018, p13). CVR technology enables film texts to generate new meanings. Emotional involvement may be the beginning of thinking, but this may be based on the audience's understanding of the potential problems of emotional involvement mentioned above.
Bibliography
Bailey, J., Bailenson, J.N., Won, A.S., Flora, J. and Armel, K.C., 2012, October. Presence and memory: immersive virtual reality effects on cued recall. In Proceedings of the International Society for Presence Research Annual Conference (Vol. 10, pp. 24-26).
Daniel, A., 2018. Inhabiting the image of'Collisions': Virtual reality cinema as a medium of ethical experience. Fusion journal, (14), pp.6-15.
Gillespie, C., 2020. virtual humanity—access, empathy and objectivity in vr film making. Global Society, 34(2), pp.145-162.
Schlembach, R. and Clewer, N., 2021. ‘Forced empathy’: Manipulation, trauma and affect in virtual reality film. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(5), pp.827-843.
Suzuki, M., 2022. The limits of humanisation:‘ideal’figures of the refugee and depoliticisation of displacement in virtual reality film Clouds Over Sidra. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25(5), pp.1266-1285.
