How Anti-Social Technology Sometimes Wins Us Over

We often look at technology, but we don’t always see it.

Today, as new ways of viewing and interacting with images proliferate through our society, the most visible new technologies are showing up in the popular use of consumer electronics. Continuing to rise in adoption globally since their introduction more than a decade ago, smartphones for example keep many of their users focused on screens even in public settings. As new and cheaper products fill markets offering users new experiences through electronic devices, we find ourselves surrounded by technology that requires us to pull our attention away from other people. I call this anti-social technology. While in the past criticisms have been made over the introduction of video games, television, or even books for their dampening of people’s interaction with the world around them, the pace at which such anti-social technologies are changing our behavior, habits, and interactions today is unprecedented (Turkle 294). Interpersonal communication has made shifts from in-person encounters to video chats, from phone calls to text messages, and from letters to email. More dramatic consequences of this are being felt in our communities, as social participation in local groups has declined dramatically over past decades. As Robert Putnam writes about America’s recent history in his book Bowling Alone:

“The rise of electronic communications and entertainment is one of the most powerful social trends of the twentieth century. In important respects this revolution has lightened our souls and enlightened our minds, but it has also rendered our leisure more private and passive. More and more of our time and money are spent on goods and services consumed individually, rather than those consumed collectively” (Putnam 265).

Not everyone sees these changes as a bad thing, as some herald digital connectivity and its impacts as a sign of progress, empowerment, and increasing equality (Florman 191). Still, reception of anti-social technologies isn’t always consistently positive. As these new technologies are introduced into the market it remains difficult to predict for certain whether or not they will meet with success.

Why do people choose to adopt anti-social technologies? This is the question I set out to ask in this paper, and my research led me to examine a number of modern examples both successful and not. Of primary interest, though, is one technology in particular that is facing this struggle right now: Virtual Reality (VR).

In the past couple of years, investment in VR technologies has grown enormously, and many are betting that those investments will pay off heavily as new VR devices rapidly become popular. But I believe that, for the backers of VR, understanding why people adopt anti-social technologies will be vital in predicting – and perhaps guiding – the future of the VR industry. It will tell us whether VR is likely to succeed, and what might help it to do so. For the rest of us, answering this question could help us understand what our future might look like, and, if it’s not what we want, how we might change that.

The promising future of virtual reality

Virtual reality’s time has come. Or at least, it would seem, that is what a large portion of the consumer electronics industry currently believes. Some declared 2015 would be “the year of virtual reality”, as investment in the sector started to rise dramatically and forthcoming new consumer devices began to be announced (Ingham). But those investments only accelerated as venture capitalists pumped another $1.2 billion into VR startups in the first quarter of 2016 alone. By mid-year there were a total of four VR “unicorns” – startups that had risen swiftly to a $1 billion-plus valuation. The first, and in many ways the start of this investment frenzy, was when Facebook bought Kickstarter-funded VR company Oculus for $2 billion in early 2014, shocking the tech world. After that, VR had the attention of the world’s largest tech companies, with fierce competition rising from Sony, HTC, and Google (Wagner). With the first major systems beginning to roll out into consumers’ hands, one industry analyst group in August of 2016 made the bold prediction that worldwide revenues for the augmented and virtual reality market would grow to more than $162 billion in 2020 (“Worldwide Revenues”).

Look around, though, and you will still not see many people with VR headsets strapped to their faces yet. Despite intense pressure to get devices out to the market, the first flagship product from Oculus, the Oculus Rift, only started shipping in the spring of 2016, and their VR controllers (handheld peripheral devices) didn’t appear until the following December. Still, audiences and investors that did get a chance to try the devices were impressed (Hamilton). As 2017 approaches, excitement and expectations remain high.

Looking in more detail at the Oculus Rift, we can see where some of VR’s unique qualities lie. Taking advantage of inexpensive high-tech components such as high-resolution displays and motion sensors developed for the smartphone market, the Rift is able to pair a smaller and lighter headset with the faster processing power of today’s gaming PC’s to create a more immersive experience that its developers call “presence” – the point at which a virtual visual environment feels real. The device essentially displays a stereoscopic pair of images in a headset that tracks head movement in real time. If you turn your head, the image moves accordingly. Using a small desktop sensor for reference users can not only rotate the headset in three dimensions, but also move laterally within a range of a few feet. The result is that a user can stand, sit, crouch, or step forward, backward, or to the side and the environment they are seeing through the headset will react accordingly.

What do these features offer a user? The result of wearing a virtual reality headset is seeing a manufactured image, but what makes this different or more valuable than any other screen that does this for us already? If we were to watch a regular feature film or television show through VR, the answer to what VR offers would probably be “not much”. You could feel like you’re viewing a much larger screen, as if in an IMAX movie theater perhaps, but the film itself would be the same.

The implied value, of course, is that virtual reality lets users do something else than simply watch a square image in front of them. Because the view within VR extends beyond your field of vision, there is no edge of the screen, no frame to the image, no proscenium separating you from what you are seeing. It turns out, two of the most powerful abilities of VR are the things that images on a screen are not so great at: scale and connection. Again, this is part of what VR creators mean by presence. When the system is working correctly and adjusted properly for the user, users see what is displayed before them in relation to themselves, as if their own bodies are in the scene. Large objects appear to actually be large relative to the user. Close or tangible things appear to actually be close or tangible. The result can be both a much greater comprehension of what is being seen, and a heightened emotional reaction to it (Lanier 186).

If there are some aspects of the current excitement over VR that sound vaguely familiar, however, there might be a reason. The consumer electronics industry has at times had the habit of proudly proclaiming technologies to be ‘the next big thing’ that in fact, did not go on to broad market success or adoption. The virtual reality sector is still very young, and its future depends on many factors coming together. To gain some perspective in trying to understand what those factors may be, I will turn to another recent darling of the consumer electronics industry: 3D television.

The rise and fall of 3D TV

After the film industry dabbled with 3D formats as early as the 1920’s and more widely in a second wave using red and green glasses in the 1970’s, the latest attempt to make 3D viewing popular to audiences was led by the 2003 film Ghosts of the Abyss. Although previous techniques had failed with problems of color and unsteady images that induced nausea, many film industry leaders believed that this time the technology was ready to make it work. Through the first decade of the 21^st century, a few dozen more titles, many of them partially or fully computer animated movies such as The Polar Express (2004), Bolt (2008), and Up (2009), were released theatrically in 3D as well as with a standard 2D option. By the time James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) was released, audiences seemed very much onboard. Emphasizing immersion into a lush, detailed virtual world, the film dazzled audiences. Avatar quickly became the highest grossing movie of all time (Minoli 17).

Electronics companies watched the growing interest in 3D cinema and saw a clear future for themselves. As early as 2008, some manufacturers had started shipping “3D-ready” flat panel TVs. By 2010 the market was awash with competition for home 3D television sales. Although prices for the devices started high, expectations were optimistic that viewers would carry their demand for 3D content over into the home. Industry forecasters predicted shipments of nearly 50 million 3D televisions by 2013, with the market to reach $15.8 billion by 2015.

Alas, despite one or two years of hard pushing by the industry in venues such as the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the United States, 3D TV did not catch on with audiences. While sales of 3D televisions (which could also display normal 2D) did rise, most consumers did not indicate that 3D was a crucial feature. In its peak year of 2012, 3D devices accounted for only 23 percent of television sales, a number which then started to decline. Some manufacturers such as Vizio and Panasonic started to pull back from the market in 2013 and 2014, and by 2015, giants Samsung and Sony had also removed 3D capabilities from their product lines (Bonnington; Katzmeier; Williams).

What happened here? How could so many large companies making significant investments in a technology be wrong about the desires of their customers? Not only does this make one curious, but in light of the current trends and predictions for virtual reality it would seem to be an important question to ask.

When we examine the response of audiences to 3D TV, we find a mix of problems. First, the devices remained expensive for the first few years which certainly cooled some people’s interest. Many people also pointed to the fact that users still needed to purchase and wear unattractive and potentially expensive glasses. There were reports of headaches and fatigue, and complaints that the technology only really worked well from a viewing position directly in front of the screen (Williams). But none of these by themselves should have been enough to prevent 3D TV from catching on. To find out what did, we must turn our attention from the product to the users.

Fatal flaws of 3D TV

3D televisions worked well for one person; at home in their living room, alone, sitting in the sweet spot of the screen, with their one pair of 3D glasses. But compared to 2D, the addition of 3D was immediately detrimental to the social aspects of television and film viewing. Adding a person meant one or both viewers didn’t see the screen properly from the center. The dorky glasses, invisible to the person wearing them, now became noticeable and embarrassing when seen on and by the other person. Then, if a third or fourth person wanted to join, at a certain point there wouldn’t be enough glasses for everyone. For a television that was a significantly more expensive investment than other options, a 3D TV provided an experience that was strikingly harder to share. Unlike the shared special occasion of a social outing to a 3D film at the theater, 3D TV was surprisingly anti-social.

This not only meant a significant disincentive toward purchasing the device, it also importantly created a major hindrance in spreading popularity from one consumer to another. Jonah Berger and Eric Schwartz discuss this in their paper, “What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word of Mouth”:

“We suggest that Word of Mouth (WOM), particularly ongoing WOM, is driven more by accessibility. … Along these lines, public visibility should also shape WOM. Some products are public (e.g., cars), while others are more private (e.g., antivirus software). More publicly visible products are easier to see, which should increase product accessibility and boost the chance they are brought up in conversation. … Likewise, using toothpaste or drinking beer should each make that product accessible, but because beer tends to be consumed more in public, consumers are more likely to have others around to tell about the product.” (Berger and Schwartz 2)

Because ownership and use of 3D TVs was not visible to others, the devices were largely not a topic of discussion for most people. Very little social capital was therefore gained by purchasing a 3D television, and many consumers ignored them entirely.

The anti-social nature of these devices wasn’t expected to be a problem, however, as the industry focused its marketing of 3D TVs on one primary assumption: the experience of watching content in 3D was better. But regardless of the social disincentives to purchasing the devices, even audiences who did own 3D-capable TVs largely continued to use them to watch content in 2D (“Who’s Watching”).

Industry analysts primarily blamed the slow adoption on a lack of 3D content, even while producers scrambled to invest funds to make new films, convert old films, and even launch new television channels in 3D (Bonnington; Minoli). But the problem was not that there wasn’t enough content for them, it was that the value of the content wasn’t enough to merit adoption of a new technology. 3D TV may have been an impressive change from 2D TV, but ultimately the wow-factor alone couldn’t make people stick around and put up with the drawbacks. The same movies and television were also available in 2D. Their stories, actors, audio, and editing were the same. What did 3D offer audiences that they were supposed to want so much? McLuhan had been left far behind: this medium had no message.

What VR can learn from 3D TV

The example of 3D television provides us with important insights into the future of virtual reality. Beyond the technical challenges, both the anti-social aspects and the questions of content apply. Regarding the social, first, virtual reality for consumers in its present form is an incredibly private activity. Closing off your senses to the real world to present them with an artificial environment for successful entertainment purposes requires the user to physically be in a safe, comfortable space without distraction (such as a private room or residence). Currently our social standards do not yet allow one to use such technologies in public, nor would many people feel secure giving up their senses of sight and sound in public spaces. Second, even in those cases where another person is nearby to observe the activity of the user, there remain few options with current VR systems for participation. Some systems display what the user is seeing on a secondary (2D) monitor, but the emotional impact of the image is basically lost. Consequently, quite unlike television or music, the experiences offered by VR are very hard to share in any meaningful way with others.

This means that, like 3D TV, virtual reality faces a strong social problem. Use of the technology in private settings is not visible to others, which limits the social currency it can create as well as opportunities for interest to spread through observation, apart from demonstrations. Furthermore, to use the technology at all requires disconnecting from others. So not only are users unable to share what they are doing, they must excuse themselves from other interactions to do it.

Regarding content, again we hear the tech industry loudly proclaim that the future of VR lies in what gets created to be put before our eyes. But a similar danger appears to what 3D TV faced, as it likely seems that simply adapting content from the video game or film industries will be inadequate. Game enthusiasts can already enjoy long, in depth experiences where they work their way through the challenges and plots of a game using a 2D screen, without the headaches, fatigue, and physical isolation of spending hours using VR (Hamilton). What makes this experience worth adopting the new technology? If VR companies bet that the wow-factor of immersion and presence will be enough, our lessons from 3D TV indicate they might be disappointed.

The social aspects and content value are both what I call “external” challenges that the VR industry faces in trying to build adoption for the technology, as opposed to “internal” challenges such as product technical attributes, user interface, and comfort. These external challenges, I believe, are what will determine audience adoption. But despite these factors being less directly under their control, companies may still have the ability to overcome these challenges by pushing toward creative new uses of the technology.

Paths to success for VR

For VR to succeed, content for the platform will need to focus on its strengths and avoid its weaknesses. Storytelling in general remains difficult. VR is rather bad for content that requires one to move one’s focus rapidly between subjects, as film does through cutting together multiple camera angles. Similarly, a fade to black can be quite disconcerting in VR, as the user is effectively left inside a dark space unsure of what will come next. Perhaps editing techniques will be developed appropriate to VR, or framing techniques that guide users to look in the right direction at the right time, but currently the customs of filmmaking make traditional movies a bad match for VR.

As stated earlier, though, VR is particularly good at both conveying the scale of a user’s relationship to an environment, and connecting emotionally with users. These are both indeed valuable for interactive experiences, and are likely the qualities that developers should focus on making use of with their content. Some have pointed toward the potential for VR in conveying empathy, such as by showing a user a mirror reflecting their face as another person, or by placing them in the tragic environment of a far-off country experiencing war or other hardship (“Limits of Virtual Reality”; “Immersive Journalism”). Although this isn’t the first technology to try this – television was expected to boost empathy among audiences as images of foreign wars for the first time were piped into people’s living rooms – VR may be able to find ways to use its unique characteristics more subtly to avoid audiences becoming desensitized to emotionally shocking content, as in the past we have seen media lose that power over time (Dahlgren 68). A different emotion to explore might be fear, which can also be heightened through VR’s sense of presence. Some have pointed out that normally popular video games of the horror/zombie genre are in fact too frightening to be enjoyable by their fans when experienced from within a virtual world, signifying again that less brutal tactics are necessary to force shocking images on audiences. In fact, there seems to be potential in using VR delicately for therapies to help people overcome phobias such as a fear of heights or flying. Of course, these may not be the types of experiences that bring large audiences consistently back for more. But it does start to show us the variety of directions that might be worth exploring.

The best types of content that will ultimately be able to win users over from other platforms to VR may not yet be known, but whatever the solution is, it will need to be original and create value beyond what other platforms already offer. Jaron Lanier, known to some as the “father of virtual reality” for his early computer industry involvement in the 1980’s, would like us to imagine far more creative uses for VR. He writes in his 2010 book, “You Are Not a Gadget”:

“In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling. I fully expect morphing to become as important a dating skill as kissing.”

He later continues:

 “The body and the rest of reality no longer have a prescribed boundary. So what are you at this point? You’re floating in there, as a center of experience. You notice you exist, because what else could be going on? I think of VR as a consciousness-noticing machine” (Lanier 187).

Lanier does not claim to have the answer for what virtual reality’s immediate value should be, but he’s certainly not limiting his thinking to new incarnations of old products. For VR’s content to give people reason to stay interested beyond the wow-factor, content creators are going to need to do the same.

What VR can learn from video games

The social aspect of virtual reality, likewise, will require a change in thinking to overcome audience resistance. For further insight, we can again return to the video game industry. While they may appear on the surface just as anti-social as VR, video games throughout their history have been dependent on shared experiences for their success. Video game arcades, as public and highly social places that peaked in popularity among youth in the early 1980s, were instrumental in popularizing home video game consoles. Both early arcade games and home consoles often had the ability for two people to play at the same time. Early home consoles such as Atari, Nintendo, and Sega became a focal point of neighborhood children’s activities, as inviting friends to play was both enjoyable and created social currency. Sharing thus spread desire for the devices to children of more families. Even games that were played alone became more interesting because users could watch each other play as they took turns, and discussions about their experiences in the games fueled conversation.

In later years as video games took advantage of the hardware abilities of personal computers, networking immediately became important as players sought to link their machines to play cooperatively and competitively. This expanded later into the development of massively multiplayer online (role-playing) games (MMOGs), where interaction and cooperation with large numbers of other, real users was key to their widespread popularity (Zackariasson 6).

The key here is that video games were never totally isolating experiences, and in many ways offered new ways for their users to be social through them. Despite having the potential to encourage anti-social behavior by asking users to withdraw from others around them and focus their attention on the game interface, the shareability and connectivity of video games throughout their evolution was able to utilize and reinforce social interactions in ways that negated many of its anti-social tendencies. While 3D TV made screen-watching even less social, video games made screens more social. In fact, video games did the same for personal computing. In the early years of personal computers, prior to social media and the type of audience-participatory internet activity that later came to be known as Web 2.0, a significant portion of activities performed with these new machines – such as using word processing, spreadsheets, and graphic design – involved little social interaction or social currency. Games helped them become interesting to talk about and share again after the novelty had worn off, and subsequently helped to build interest in computers among a younger generation. Still, it might not be completely fair to label personal computers as anti-social technology. Their introduction certainly did cause a great number of people to devote time to using them in isolation, however the types of activities they replaced – writing, accounting, and design, for instance – were not highly social activities in the first place.

What VR can learn from smartphones

The majority of activities performed on the ubiquitous smartphones of today, on the other hand, could hardly be classified as work tasks in the same way. As of June 2016 Apple reported there were over 2 million apps available in its App Store for iPhone and iPad, and the Google Play store the same year reported 2.4 million apps for its Android platform. Among the dozens of categories in these stores, “Business” only accounted for about ten percent of apps in the App Store, five percent in Google Play (“App Store Categories”; Olmstead). No, it’s not work apps that are filling consumers’ phones. Games are the most popular downloads for smartphones by far (“App Store Statistics”).

But when people are playing games using smartphones, focusing on their screens for entertainment instead of other people around them, the anti-social aspects of what they are doing, interestingly, becomes disguised. I began this piece by pointing to smartphones as the first example of anti-social technology – technology which pulls the users attention away from others around them – but most users themselves do not appear to be concerned. Perhaps if smartphones were truly as lacking in social connectivity as 3D TV, they would not have had such an adoption rate among consumers as they did. Smartphones have benefited however from two defenses against the anti-social label: 1) as mobile telephones they are cloaked in the illusion of being social, and 2) they are able to replace one type of social behavior (face-to-face conversation) with another, more mediated type (in-app interactions, text communication, and social media).

First, by grouping all of these activities inside a device ostensibly still seen as a “telephone”, the anti-social view of the activity is lessened. The user is, at least potentially, connected to others through the device. Furthermore, because it is also a mobile phone, the primary purpose of which is to bring technology along with you into public places, the smartphone made the use of apps around others a socially acceptable behavior surprisingly quickly: mobile phones themselves had already cleared that road. People may be narrowly focusing their attention on the small screens in their hands, but they feel they are not being anti-social because they are using communications devices, and because they can be in the physical presence of others while doing so. Being out in public and not shut in their private homes reduces the impression of being disengaged from others.

Second, these devices encourage the shift from active to passive social interactions. When communicating through a smartphone, it can become easy and tempting to control and filter one’s interactions with people by replacing in-person or voice conversations with short written text messages or emails. By slowing conversations down into small bites, users remain more in control of what they say and how they wish to be perceived. Consequently, actual (real-time) social interaction becomes subtracted from communication, but the feeling of connection appears to remain. Users therefore can feel social even when their attention is focused on a device and not a person. Human connection, all but absent from such transactions, seems to be present by just reading and writing social media posts. Again, therefore, the low level of interaction with others physically near to a user can appear to be justified or go unnoticed.

In some ways of course activities performed through social media apps or email must be counted as social, and that is part of how smartphones have succeeded in becoming adopted despite their isolating effects. Being always reachable appears to many to be indeed a desirable social characteristic. But the quality of our actual interactions with our smartphones – taking our attention away from those who are physically with us – gives them a strong anti-social flavor in comparison to normal human interactions without them.

To learn from the success of smartphones, virtual reality will need to find its own ways of portraying itself as connected or cloaking its anti-social aspects. In its present state, VR is not yet conducive to social media viewing in the same way as smartphones, at least not in the short-attention-span, fear-of-missing out, and endless-stream-of-updates form in which we currently receive it. But more importantly than having the appearance of being social, VR will need to actually involve more social interactions in order to spread interest. Not being able to offer the same kinds of shared experiences as users get with regular video games is another drawback of VR’s current state. But for the technology to really catch on with audiences and stick, it will need to face this challenge in addition to that of the creation of new, valuable content. Without these developments, any positive experiences within the VR environment will continue to be offset by the difficulty in sharing those experiences or subsequently spreading interest.

Conclusion

The present rise we are seeing in the adoption of anti-social technologies that require us to pull our attention away from other people is rapidly changing our behavior, habits, and interactions with each other. But as these examples have shown, such technologies, in order to become successful, must overcome the drawbacks of their anti-social qualities either by creating opportunities for other types of social interaction, or by incentivizing and allowing consumers to use them in public so as to avoid social isolation and maintain visibility of their use. Furthermore, because the adoption of these technologies also challenges consumers with new expenses, incompatibility issues, and difficulties in learning how to operate new devices, ultimately the content for these new platforms must offer sufficient value to the users to merit changing from or abandoning a previous technology. Whether switching from television to video games, from simple phones to smartphones, or from 2D to 3D television, users must believe that the benefits that can only be delivered through the new technology is worth the cost and effort.

These two factors, social visibility and content value, will be vital to the future of VR. Currently, while the popularity of smartphones and video games appear ubiquitous, the future of virtual reality technology in joining them is not certain. As a very private experience, VR is not conducive to use in public places or even to easily share with others as a home entertainment system. Consequently, in terms of social visibility VR faces the danger of following in the footsteps of 3D television, however it also has the opportunity to learn from the success of the video game industry. Similarly, the manufacturers of VR remain at the mercy of content creators as the industry is developing. If those content creators limit themselves to bringing to VR the same types of content that exist already in other forms of media, users will not have sufficient incentive to purchase and use the systems. In order to make the leap to become a technology that has staying power, the VR industry will require content that gives users new access to valuable experiences or abilities.

Both of these factors are external challenges for manufacturers, beyond the technical details, product design, and marketing strategies they directly control. But if the industry as a whole sees the importance of thinking this way, solutions can quite likely be found that draw audiences to uniquely valuable content and guide them to use the devices in socially visible ways that will be key to virtual reality’s success.