Choose your own future: the sociotechnical imaginaries of virtual reality

ABSTRACT

Virtual Reality has been heralded variously as the next steppingstone in technological innovation, a utopian ‘empathy-machine’ and a dystopian addictive technology. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore the types of narratives underlying this global attention and the ideological values, beliefs and interests therein. We contribute to the critical marketing literature by demonstrating how an examination of sociotechnical imaginaries reveals the ways in which the market mediates the reception of new technologies and the kinds of worlds these technologies bring about. Through an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ narrative, we bring these imaginaries into relief and invite readers to navigate alternative potential futures for VR. The data underpinning the narrative highlight the role of marketers and marketing in shaping our social, political and economic reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality
• digital marketing
• sociotechnical imaginaries
• interactive narratives
• Twine
• critical discourse analysis

To choose your own future please click on: https://canukl.github.io/vrsociotechnicalimaginaries/

Marketing imaginaries

‘The future’s already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’ - William Gibson

Marketing is known to be a hotbed for imaginaries, whether these are based on desires and fantasies (e.g. Salazar, 2012) or fears (e.g. Campbell & Deane, 2019). The creative use of seductive as well as restrictive imaginaries is central to the marketing concept with its utopian ambition of perfectly satisfied customers. Bradshaw et al. (2021, p. 4) argue that utopian desires are no longer ‘invested in spiritual afterlives or political salvation’ but rather, in the market. Maclaran and Brown (2001) provide an overview of the utopian character of marketing phenomena and demonstrate the critical and transformative function of utopianism in looking forward to better futures (and pasts) and articulating alternatives to the status quo, particularly, institutional forces. In this sense, they show that utopian critiques are not just speculative and abstract but can work performatively. Similarly, Brown et al. (1996, p. 676) define the essence of marketing as the ‘development, dissemination and manipulation of image’ and therefore the production, distribution and consumption of utopias. Marketing, they argue, simulates and exploits our innate human propensity whereby we wish to envisage new or alternative futures. Through our alternative form of presenting our findings, more on which below, we seek to bring these futures to life.

Our vision of the future is thus mediated by the market. Considering imaginaries, we argue, is therefore central to marketing research. While Salazar (2012, p. 1) offers a critical analysis of tourism imaginaries, demonstrating how these imaginaries offer ‘a powerful deconstruction device of ideological, political and sociocultural stereotypes and clichés’, there has been surprisingly little on sociotechnical imaginaries. Sociotechnical imaginaries can be defined as ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 4). That these have not been investigated is all the more remarkable given that marketing rhetoric is increasingly linked to technological innovations such as big data, social media, or online shopping. Indeed, Brownlie’s (2009) paper on technology forecasting is a rare exception. Although Brownlie did not use the concept of imaginaries, he examined the narrative material that serves to frame social action before it can be enacted and therefore operates as ‘a material culture through which we come to understand ourselves’ (208).

Technology has long been positioned as a tool of seduction, feeding utopian (and, at times, dystopian) desires (Harrigan et al., 2020). In this sense Virtual Reality (VR hereafter), the subject of this study, as an immersive technology, is most representative of a medium whereby consumer desires can be materialised and ‘an opportunity for the enchantment of everyday’ (Denegri‐Knott & Molesworth, 2010, p. 126). Much of the marketing literature that focuses on technology, particularly new forms of immersive technology such as VR, takes a utopian stance in line with a ‘technological solutionism’ narrative (Morozov, 2013) focusing primarily on practical applications of these technologies, framing them as neutral in line with Western modernism (Botez et al., 2020). Šimůnková (2019) notes that most studies in CCT and marketing emphasise either the producers or marketers or consumers at either end of the technology rather than the role of the technology itself.

Kozinets et al., (2017, p. 659) argue that the rise of digital technologies has led to the establishment of networks of desire, that is ‘complex, open systems of technologies, consumers, energised passion, and virtual and physical objects interacting as an interconnected desiring-machine that produces consumption interest within the wider social system and among the interconnected actors’. Although seductive and enchanting, there is therefore a dark side to any technology which the critical marketing literature makes clear: these fantasies or imaginings are not ‘free’ but rather subject to market mechanics (Molesworth & Denegri-Knott, 2008). For example, Darmody and Zwick (2020), show how digital marketers construct a romantic, fictional, fairytale narrative whereby algorithmic manipulation of consumers in surveillance marketing is indistinguishable from consumer empowerment. In demonstrating how these narratives work symbolically, the paradox at the heart of the market’s use of new technologies becomes clear. Similarly, Zwick and Bradshaw (2016) had previously shown how marketing literature conceptualises the existence of online brand communities, of which there is little empirical evidence yet, which serves an important ideological function for marketers by offering magical ways to manage and govern consumers by facilitating consumers’ self-management and self-government. Performatively, the concept therefore becomes a material reality in marketing practice.

There is therefore a need for more critical, macro-approaches in studying technological tools in marketing in order to further consider the ideologies which frame our use of these technologies in the global political economy. Hornborg (2014) highlights the need to reveal the social relations underlying modern technologies as they are founded on asymmetric global relations of exchange. Indeed, as our analysis will show, the framing of technology as a ‘gift to humanity from the wealthier nations of the world’ (Hornborg, 2014, p. 121) is a clear trope that comes through in our data, obscuring the power, gender, cultural and ecological disparities that these technologies exploit, part of the unquestioned forward-looking ‘development’ agenda of neoliberal capitalism (Valentine, 2000). As Šimůnková (2019, p. 48) demonstrates, there are significant consequences to the way new technologies shape our experiences and social relations: they are ‘societal driving force[s], embedded in both global processes and everyday practices’. It has become increasingly clear that cyberspace and the Internet and associated technologies are not the radical, liberating, egalitarian forces they were once posited to be (or at least are not solely so) and have become in many ways, a ‘world-wide cage’ built on hegemonic models of thinking (Botez et al., 2020, p. 1404). It is therefore important, as Hietanen and Andéhn (2018) argue, to examine the underlying power relations and market discipline which are implicit in these technologies.

At a time when new immersive technologies such as VR are being lauded as central to the economy (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2019), we therefore ask what are the sociotechnical imaginaries of VR? How do these sociotechnical imaginaries frame the future(s) of VR? And finally, what kind of world views do these imaginaries bring about? In using sociotechnical imaginaries as a lens, we reveal how the future is framed within the market thus stymieing any real alternatives to the current ideological order of late capitalism and furthermore, how VR, as a case study of emergent technology, serves to invisibilise the power asymmetries which are required for that order.

Prophecies for VR

According to PwC (2019) the virtual reality (VR) market will be worth £350 billion to the UK economy by 2030, representing a 2.83% increase in GDP. The VR market is already a billion-dollar global industry (since 2016), largely due to video game sales, while headset sales are predicted to approach 200 million units within the next few years (PwC, 2019). These optimistic forecasts envision a healthy future for VR, spanning well beyond entertainment, with considerable implications for the future of healthcare, training and education, the workplace, retail and consumer experiences, manufacturing and product development as well (Barnes, 2016). It is therefore not surprising that VR has generated a lot of attention from both industry and government (Bezegová et al., 2017; Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2019; European Commission, 2019). Official widespread endorsement of VR frames it as the next largest steppingstone in technological innovation and this has translated into concrete funding actions.

It is not, however, the first time that VR has been hailed as heralding the beginning of a new, better era; first formulated as we know it in the 1950s and 60s (Sutherland, 1965), the first commercial VR tools appeared in the 80s and 90s (Lanier, 1992), generating great excitement. Ultimately, however, the utopian vision did not match the digital means available and VR disappeared from public view and was rumoured to be ‘dead’ (Slater & Sanchez-Vives, 2016). It is only in the past decade that VR has again emerged from the shadows and been described as ‘the next new thing’, attracting the interest of investors and the general public, particularly since Facebook (now Meta) bought Oculus (a VR headset producer) for two billion dollars (Luckerson, 2014). Despite this buoyant optimism (Feldman, 2017), there are signs that clunky headsets, a dearth of content and lack of consumer interest are hampering these forecasts (Feltham, 2019; Probst et al., 2017).

There is therefore much debate as to whether VR will revolutionise the economy or whether it is just another overhyped fad driven by inflated expectations rather than actual shifts in operational reality. While we cannot resolve this debate, our focus in this alternative piece is on the types of narratives that underlie this global attention and ultimately shape the technology’s future and therefore our own social reality – not only in technology and business circles but also among political authorities – and how these discourses are disseminated to the wider public, whether as fictional stories, advertisements, PR press releases, news stories, or white papers. By presenting alternative scenarios that depict the future of VR in our interactive narrative, we investigate the ideological values, beliefs and interests that guide the rhetoric around VR and the implications thereof. We use the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2015) to contextualise these metanarratives by adopting a macro-analytical perspective, examining some of the economic, institutional and epistemic challenges that contribute to the production and perpetuation of a VR imaginary that operates as a cultural model.

Virtual reality is defined as a computer-generated, completely immersive 3-dimensional virtual and aural environment that a user experiences, usually through a head-mounted display (Immerse & Catapult, 2019). Research about VR is still limited as the technology has not yet achieved maturity. While there is a significant amount of work in the fields of psychology and human-computer interaction (see Lanier et al., 2019 for a systematic review), there is still relatively little in the marketing literature, with the notable exception of (Barnes, 2016) comprehensive overview of the implications and potential of VR for marketing. Barnes demonstrates VR’s immersive potential in affording marketers the opportunity to provide prospective consumers with realistic experiences of products, services or places without physical co-location. He also considers how VR could lead to significant affective, cognitive and behavioural change both at an individual and social level.

Picking up on this potential and noting the lack of insight into commercial applications of VR, research has started to emerge focusing on engaging customers through VR. Hollebeek et al. (2020, p. 3) map out the role of VR in the customer journey, defining the journey as ‘firms’ use of computer-mediated interactive environments that are capable of offering sensory feedback to engage consumers, strengthen consumer/brand relationships, and drive desired consumer behaviours at any stage of their journey’, that is pre-, intra- and post-VR. They draw on the Technology Acceptance Model to understand consumers’ VR readiness, psychological models to understand their engagement and the brand relationship literature to consider the outcomes of the VR experience; the paper presents a holistic overview of potential drivers of adoption and engagement for marketers as well as a consideration of the types of content that are more likely to be perceived as meaningful to consumers. Pöyry et al.’s (2020) paper also focuses on customer interactions and engagement but in the business-to-business sphere. Their research shows that powerful user experiences in VR trigger customer engagement but they caution that this engagement can fluctuate significantly. Going beyond a simple focus on the technological novelty to demonstrate the unique service features and outcomes on offer is therefore required for profitable use of VR. Both of these recent studies thus highlight the benefits of VR in allowing service providers to give customers’ new and immersive ways of visualising their offerings; however, they also point to some of the frictions involved in customer adoption of VR, illustrating once more the gap between the potential and actual.

While these studies are valuable early forays into the instrumental value of VR for marketing or service-delivery, there has been less consideration of the structural and ideological implications of this new technology, essentially its politics. More critical considerations are needed given that virtual worlds are ‘an ensemble of social, technical and market relations coursing through all areas of present-day existence’ (Dholakia & Reyes, 2013, pp. 13–14). This is particularly the case due to the personalised data that VR technology captures which is part and parcel of surveillance capitalism’s focus on ‘hypernudging’ the consumer, thus, as Darmody and Zwick (2020, p. 9) show, ‘co-creating [the consumer] at an ontological level’ and legitimising the commodification of all forms of life (Zwick & Bradshaw, 2016). Indeed, Darmody and Zwick (2020, p. 6) highlight how surveillance renders the consumer into ‘actionable data signatures’, although of course this is largely left unsaid. Celis Bueno’s (2020, p. 83) analysis of facial recognition algorithms evidences how these operate as ‘apparatuses of machinic enslavement’ in simultaneously bringing together fragmented flows of individual data and huge aggregates. As well as the technology itself, there is also a need to study its host platforms. Zwick and Bradshaw (2016) show how marketers extract value from the production of consumer communication, lifestyles and subjectivities and given that Meta is one of the key VR operators and retains private ownership of all data and content collected on their headsets (Meta, 2022), there is cause for concern in the development of the VR industry.

It is clear that in evoking the notion of alternative virtual worlds, VR captures the public imagination; however, as an emerging technology, most discussions (academic or other) focus on its future potential. It is thus a rich context of study to consider how collective visions are structured around a logic of promise which deals in metaphors and visions, hopes, dreams, ambitions but also fears, nightmares and anxieties. Moreover, it is clear that any forecasts or predictions reveal more about the present than they do about the future. Brownlie’s (2009) study of sociotechnical discourses examines the role of uncertainty in decision making in marketing management by revisiting how future scenarios diverged or otherwise from what came to pass. Unsurprisingly, he found that ‘there really is only one thing you can be certain about in a forecast, and that is that it will be wrong’ (405). We study these metanarratives, therefore, not to provide any definite answers about the future of VR but rather to examine how they reflect the current hopes and fears of various key stakeholders and unpack the implied politics and power dynamics which frame these.

Sociotechnical imaginaries

The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, introduced by Jasanoff and Kim (2009) and elaborated in Jasanoff and Kim (2015), has been influential within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It is loosely based on political and cultural theory studies of social imaginaries (Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Appadurai, 1996; Taylor, 2004) but with a focus on science and technology as key sites of the contemporary imagination. Building on Jasanoff and Kim’s definition of sociotechnical imaginaries as collective visions of desirable futures, we argue that visions of undesirable futures also play into this as they serve to illustrate shared perceptions of futures that should not be realised. Moreover, diverging opinions and contrasting ideas serve to uncover some of the underlying inscribed values, goals and politics of these visions. As an analytical tool, sociotechnical imaginaries bring a wider frame of examination to ongoing research on technology in marketing, ‘imagined publics’ and the sociology of expectations, helping us understand the collective discourses that bound ‘rational’ economic pursuits of innovation for the public good and legitimise certain kinds of investment. They thus serve to help us understand how specific technological paths are legitimised, i.e. what futures should emerge and the ideologies that frame these.

Jasanoff and Kim (2015) highlight three key aspects of sociotechnical imaginaries: firstly, their situatedness, meaning that they are culturally and temporally specific, embedded within specific socio-political environments; secondly, that they are materially grounded, so are co-produced within heterogeneous networks of both human and non-human actors; and thirdly, that they have performative power: once imaginaries are accepted, they shape trajectories of research and innovation, i.e. have serious normative implications producing concrete effects in the world. The ways in which these imaginaries are articulated therefore imprison us in certain specific visions with specific sets of fears and desires. What starts as a description of a potential future can soon become a prescription, operating as a ‘socially transmitted representational assemblage’ which is used as a meaning-making and world-shaping device (Salazar, 2012, p. 864).

Dean et al. (2017) and Simakova and Neyland (2008) highlight the significance of ‘tellable’ stories in creating new markets for emerging technology. In theorising technology marketing, Simakova and Neyland also emphasise that new technologies have certain market orientations designed into them which shape the way in which they are adopted. As such, the discourses which build around these new technologies narrate boundaries, relations and subjectivities for consumers. While these studies offer valuable insights about how marketers tell stories about new technologies, we broaden the focus to consider the wider ‘tellable’ stories that operate in society as a whole (not just in B2B contexts). We therefore follow Jasanoff and Kim (2015) in considering how an examination of sociotechnical imaginaries provides insights into the ideological framing of desirable futures and therefore imagined understandings of how the world ought to be.

Making imaginaries visible

By their nature, imaginaries remain intangible, so the only way to study them is by focusing on the multiple conduits through which they pass and become visible in the form of images and discourses. In our case, these channels ranged from fiction and non-fiction books, films and TV shows such as Neuromancer, The Matrix and Black Mirror, to newspaper and magazine articles from trade and consumer press, to marketing material such as advertisements and press releases, to academic and policy documents representing a range of stakeholders. We used search tools related to each of these channels to identify relevant texts covering the 10-year period (2010–20, although due to the growth in interest, the majority of texts were from the second half of this period) in which VR has re-emerged as the ‘technology of the future’ (e.g. Google to identify relevant books, films and TV shows; LexisNexis for newspapers, magazines, and press releases; academic library databases for academic and policy documents; Twitter, not-for-profit media outlets, and academic and industry listservs for marketing and industry-related content). These texts were collected over a period of two years as part of a larger study of future audiences for VR, resulting in a dataset of 146 texts (at the end of each interactive narrative is a list of references used). Due to the variety of texts used, these represent different ideological positionings, but nonetheless they are largely ‘mainstream’ and representative of the general public discourses around VR.

The sheer amount of material available about VR required us to be purposeful in selecting and including data. This material was examined in detail in two stages. First, the authors read texts and coded themes manually, leading to identification of the most prominent themes in texts about VR (e.g. benefits, empathy, innovation, interactivity, risk, privacy). At the same time, we began to observe and track discursive constructions as well as patterns within these (Corbin & Strauss, 2014). Arising as particularly interesting in this stage of analysis were a number of semiotic characteristics of the texts themselves – metaphors and symbols for the affordances of VR, ways in which risk and benefit were framed, and narrative emplotments of technologically-mediated progress or failure. Semiotic properties such as these are worth exploring in detail as language itself is a ‘crucially important medium for the construction of imaginaries’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 122).

Subsequently, our reading process was informed by the methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which seeks to understand texts as relations between a) socially-embedded semiotic processes, b) the language norms of particular social fields (e.g. science fiction or marketing blogs), and c) the ideologies, institutions, beliefs or cultural values that they reflect and constitute (Fairclough, 2010, pp. 230–231). After the initial thematic analysis, the texts were mined for insights into the framing of futures as well as for specific verbal tropes and analogies that help identify the elements of the imaginary. To do so we returned to the key characteristics of sociotechnical imaginaries: their situatedness, material grounding and performative power. We followed Longhurst and Chilvers (2019) in attending to the various visions presented, in terms of form, scope and setting as well as the ideological framing conditions and actors involved. Specifically, for each text we recorded the type of actor that wrote the text and the social fields the texts were a part of or within which they made their claims (e.g. international organisation, think tank, government body, academic, consultancy, journalistic, etc.); the format of the text (e.g. policy document, academic article, report, professional press release, news article, blog, etc.); the language norms among the semiotic characteristics of the texts within these fields; the geographic imaginary (e.g. global or national and which country/ies¹); the material technologies which were the subject of the text (e.g. different forms of VR but also often Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and 5 G networks); the dominant objective (e.g. securing investment, growing the market, warning of ethical concerns, etc.) and the temporality of the vision (e.g. future, present or past-focused as interpretations of the past shape visions of the future); and finally the dominant tropes that emerged in the text (further discussed in the analysis section below). In the cases where there were multiple tropes within one text, the coding took account of all of them.

In the analysis of the social fields of the texts we therefore identified the key stakeholders in the field. We observed topical and thematic overlaps among stakeholder groups, and particular use cases for VR that dominated the discourse. At this point we eliminated from our dataset any text that did not relate to the key stakeholders and the identified use cases. We drew on social constructionist epistemology in our analysis: this entails consideration of how the self is produced by – and constituted in relation to – discourse (see also Türken et al., 2016). In this sense, CDA gives us an insight into how particular understandings of the world are disseminated in society and how these can be challenged. Although of course it is worth noting that coding is permeable to subjective judgements and interpretation, this process allowed us to get a sense of the ideologies, beliefs or values presented in terms of their mainstream/fringe position within their social fields, as informed by our observations of similarities and differences of perspective arising among them. All three authors analysed the data, confirming themes to ensure a high level of intercoder agreement, and although we did not exhaust all the sources in our final dataset, we reached theoretical saturation. In order to represent this complex set of data, and as becoming of a study of VR imaginaries using CDA, we chose to create a digital, interactive game using Twine, an open-source tool for telling language-based, interactive, nonlinear stories.

Presenting marketing differently

Structuring the interactive narrative

The choice of creating an interactive narrative was made due to the ability to exemplify some of the key characteristics of VR: the creation of alternative worlds, interaction and perceived agency, gamification, immersion and the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Wilson and Saklofske (2019) demonstrate the value of Twine in facilitating open social scholarship due to the fact that it creates highly controlled, conditional, choice-and-consequence-based, problem-solving environments in which players are expected to interact with simulated settings and elements after agreeing to take on particular roles. This playful method of presentation therefore foregrounds critical exploration and engagement with the research findings through alternative configurations of data. Players are provided with the opportunity to curate their own route through the data in order to understand and perform particular forms of arguments through praxis. As such the game requires players to demonstrate active, decisive engagement.

An interactive narrative also serves to illustrate how virtual realities invite us to ‘conduct ourselves along programmed and potential routes of consumption’ (Sawchuck, 1994, p. 94 in Dholakia & Reyes, 2013). Furthermore, this tension between structure and agency (in that the player has choice but this does not necessarily equate to a lack of constraint as the choice is predetermined by the author) also highlights the value of sociotechnical imaginaries as they dismantle these binaries. Indeed, sociotechnical imaginaries require interpretive research and analysis to trace the norms that are reproduced or undone through these technologies and how this occurs through historically contingent social, institutional and discursive macro-level forces (Askegaard & Linnet, 2011; Moser, 2006; Thompson et al., 2013). This, in turn, entails attending to the means by which imaginaries frame and represent alternative futures, link past and future times, enable or restrict actions in space, and naturalise ways of thinking about possible worlds. Our interactive narrative therefore offers a fictional performative script based on the texts we analysed.

In order to represent this complex set of data in a clear way, we had to make decisions as to how to structure the interactive narrative. We did this in three ways, as guided by our data. Firstly, in order to start the narrative, the player is presented with an initial choice – which stakeholder the user ‘embodies’ through role-play. This choice presents the player with four branching narratives from the perspective of either a VR maker, consumer, advertiser or policy maker: the four key stakeholders identified through the analysis of the social fields of the texts. This privileges certain perspectives and groups of people, thus reflecting the imaginative work of the key social actors involved in the formation of the VR market and illustrating their role in performing and producing these visions of collective good. Significantly, in reflecting the relations between these stakeholders and VR we pay attention to all these actors as differently agentic in what imaginaries come to be. Agency is thus distributed as not all actors have the same capacities to produce imaginaries. While many imaginaries co-exist, only certain ones achieve dominance (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015); moreover their effects are not pre-determined and could lead to unintended consequences. We also recognise that the consumer perspective is somewhat limited in that our data does not directly reflect consumer views (except in a few cases where we used blog posts); we therefore interpreted this based on the media discourses which were speaking to a general audience. However, we must be reflexive and note that as Maclaran and Brown (2001) found, consumer meaning-making is often surprising and unanticipated in localised and contextualised ways.

In studying imaginaries, Salazar (2012), p. 14) highlights the importance of retaining ‘a clear idea about the chief interest groups behind these processes and avoid[ing] the mistake of seeing imaginaries as just a range of possibilities’. The presentation of our research in this interactive way allows the user to play different roles and thereby demonstrate that the imaginaries are never politically neutral. It also serves to demonstrate how values, meanings and forms of knowledge can be altered, changed and renegotiated at all points. The interactivity invites a participatory critique of politically charged actions which the player is expected to perform without a broader understanding of their implications and consequences. Moreover, the interactivity afforded by Twine allow players multiple pathways through ideas, demonstrating the fragility of positionings while exploring the consequences of different choices. It also illustrates the messy, fluid uncertainty at the heart of imaginations which are prone to sudden change as well.

Once the stakeholders were selected, the themes that arose in our data related to these stakeholders were then selected as the core of the narratives, and these branch according to the potential different perspectives, choices and actions identified in our analysis. We chose to provide the same five ‘use cases’ for each stakeholder. These are significant domains in which VR is expected to gain traction as identified through the analysis of the social fields of our texts: namely, entertainment, education, industry and the workplace, travel and experience, and health and wellbeing. By offering the opportunity for multiple readings of the same ideas from multiple perspectives, an interactive narrative allows for an understanding of the connectivity between ideas and concepts. This is particularly useful in representing imaginaries, which, as we have shown, are based on a particular knowledge of the present and selective assumptions about how this can be translated in the future. They are therefore open to many different constructions and representations. Moreover, the structure of Twine also means players can return at any point and re-visit several times from alternative perspectives for a completely different take on the same theme.

Finally, we structured the next choice as distinguishing between three alternate futures for each use case: utopian, dystopian and dualopian, following Letheren, Russell-Bennett and Whittaker’s recent commentary (2020) covering current debates on artificial intelligence and the influence of marketing on which direction the technology takes us. We follow Bradshaw et al. (2021 p. 5) in conceptualising utopia and dystopia as ‘a valuable means to structure and organise social reality and the social imagination as a system of values’ in line with sociotechnical imaginaries. These are not signalled as such to the player, however, as one individual’s utopia is another’s dystopia: they are two sides of the same coin. Indeed as Bradshaw, et al. argue, every utopia is exclusive in that certain identities are prioritised over others. We therefore leave it up to the player to decide.

Theorising the interactive narrative

Our analysis of the socially-situated semiotic characteristics of the texts and the ideological positions they represented led us to identifying three dominant, recurring tropes that structured the visions we analysed: VR as a tool to transform and improve the economy; VR as an empathy machine which will make the world a better place one individual at a time and tackle societal challenges; and VR as an isolating, addictive immersive technology facilitating a form of micro-governance based on the exploitation of intimate data. Unsurprisingly, some tropes were more popular than others with the economic argument identified in just over 50% of the texts, followed in popularity by VR’s utility in tackling societal challenges. These tropes are therefore reproduced throughout the different Twine stories in various ways, at times intersecting with each other in more complex ways. In particular, as Salazar (2012) discusses, many imaginaries are structured by dichotomies and therefore largely come in two forms: as positive (utopian) and as negative (dystopian) scenarios which we see played out in the above tropes. As with most new technologies, VR is depicted as either ‘a magic wand for a radiant future or as a destructive tool for a catastrophic future’ (Mele et al., 2019, p. 965; see also Hofacker and Corsaro's (2020) recent editorial on the inherent paradoxes of digital services and how they lead to marketing utopia or dystopia). While most of the visions we identified fell clearly into either utopian cheerleading (the majority, just over 85%) or dystopian fear mongering camps (the rest), the additional dualopian option we selected for our narratives offered us a more nuanced, analytical choice which is rarely evidenced in the data we analysed but emerged from it.

We found that the ideological framings of these visions to a large extent implicitly assumed rather deterministic, grand narratives of technological progress and economic success and as a consequence, an urgent need to capitalise on this opportunity to unlock a bright and prosperous future. This is in line with the neoliberal view that consumers are free and autonomous agents as found in much of the mainstream marketing literature (Askegaard & Linnet, 2011; Belz & Peattie, 2009). Words such as productivity, innovation, competitiveness, efficiency and growth identified this positioning. Even those visions that were more critical were based on similar assumptions about the free market, limiting their critique to the fact that economics takes precedence over social desirability yet not exploring viable alternatives. Much like Campbell and Deane (2019), we therefore found that there is a lack of fantasy about what political relations might be like outside the terms set down by the market. Most of the identified risks of VR are assumed to be amenable to technological fixes, if the right algorithms are in place, as per technological solutionism. Structural problems are not considered, or as Valentine (2000, p. 39) puts it ‘ideology is present as a practice of masking the visible’. Indeed, if we look at the two most popular tropes in more detail, the economic argument hides the heavy environmental cost of VR; while the case for VR as an empathy machine leaves unquestioned who benefits from empathy, fostering no critical reflection (often the result of psychological reductionism) and mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the self-image of VR users and perhaps, more so, makers who are predominantly based in Silicon Valley, further implicating the technology in a wider culture of imperialism. VR is presented as offering transparent embodied immediacy when in fact, firstly, it is a medium that is primarily produced by men for men (women, for example, are more likely to feel motion sick than men due to being designed for the male interpupillary distance (Analysis, 2020)); and secondly, it comes from the metropole, and is still unaffordable to much of the global population. Our approach therefore brought to the fore power, gender, cultural and ecological disparities which underlie the technology (Hornborg, 2014) which could then be integrated into our narratives.

In line with CDA, we sought to tease out the various subject positions offered by this neoliberal discourse and reflect them in our narratives, although we must be clear that despite the significance of the mass media and policy in shaping our ways of seeing and understanding the world, this does not directly translate to individuals as they play an active role in interpreting and appropriating these visions. As could be expected, our analysis evidenced that the subject is always individualised, whether as a rational and autonomous consumer/worker (in line with the free market, being a productive member of society); as a responsible and empathetic being (that is, self-disciplined and willingly doing good); or as an unaware dupe (who has not informed themself and as such, has failed). This individualisation is integrated into our narrative in that each pathway is from the viewpoint of a specific individual. In this way, VR is always presented as a natural next stop in technological innovation to which there cannot be any collective response. It is not surprising then that our data shows little to no consideration of the environmental and working conditions that underlie this proprietary digital technology, and while we did find some focus on representation in VR content, for example, there was little attention on the back-end, whereby the hardware is made in non-environmentally sustainable ways (Joehnig, 2018) or on the exploitative working conditions these technology companies outsource (Perrigo, 2022). The shiny ‘new’ technology, framed as an empathy-machine, thus hides the asymmetric power relations that make it possible, providing nothing but a repackaging of the old (Ahlberg et al., 2021). In fact, it could be argued that the technology serves this very purpose, providing us with blissful virtual environments (e.g. natural, relaxing landscapes) that are not available to us in our ‘real’ lives. Again, these ideas were repackaged and formed some of the storylines in our interactive narrative. The dystopian scenarios allowed us to also subvert these playfully, in an attempt to provoke critique.

The interpretation and representation required by imaginaries are left to the players in our interactive narrative: they are seemingly free to actively shape the future while playing, demonstrating how the future casts its shadow in the present. The format therefore serves to illustrate the complex interconnected, heterogeneous networks of social, political, economic and technological actors which shape markets, in this case the VR market. Multiple imaginaries can coexist within a society in tension or in a productive dialectical relationship (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). As Dholakia and Reyes (2013, p. 1582) argue, the ‘digital realm is not merely a collection of separate worlds, discreet nodes, or otherwise unrelated communication platforms’ but rather it is constructed and connected by process of virtualisation which are less easily observed (e.g. tracking cookies, algorithms, game engines, etc.). Our analysis of sociotechnical imaginaries therefore highlights the dominating influence of global capital and the fact that the virtual is not un-real but rather a ‘simultaneous, substitute, stereo terrain resulting from the coexistence of simultaneous reals’ (Dholakia & Reyes, 2013, p. 1583). The gatekeeping function of those that control the data technologies and its narratives is thus highlighted, and so too the social and economic power asymmetry that underlies VR technology and its processes. Much of the ideological framing of our data therefore implicitly places the burden on the individual consumer in a context of high complexity and weak (to no) regulation. Our narratives illustrate some of these processes of virtual worlds, rather than just studying their representations, answering (Dholakia & Reyes, 2013): 1587) call for research to examine ‘the intangible connections between parallactically paired realities’.

Implications

The interactive narrative and this companion piece contribute to the marketing literature in three ways. Firstly, we warn against the overly enthusiastic acceptance of new technology by marketing academics as a way to correct societal failings and transform the market. Rather, we highlight that we must consider technology in relation to the broader social and political-economic environment in which it operates, uncovering their ideological functions (Celis Bueno, 2020). These technologies are not neutral but serve certain power interests, as demonstrated above, and these have to be unpicked and revealed. Hietanen and Andéhn (2018), for example, show that videography disciplines the viewer into particular subject positions. There is a need to move beyond the representational and practical applications of particular technologies to face – and theorise – the political powers of the medium in its wider, socio-historical context. We build on this work by considering, for example, the imagined publics that emerge in public discourses about VR, notably in the construction of specific characteristics attributed to them (e.g. able-bodied, male and certainly ‘actionable data signatures’ (Darmody & Zwick, 2020, p. 6)), as ideal expectations of future users which are then materially scripted into the technology. In tracing how this technology has been mobilised and discussed, we see how certain positions of agency and subjectivity are opened up, how certain actions are enabled or restricted and how certain ways of thinking are naturalised.

Secondly, we introduce and highlight the normative implications of sociotechnical imaginaries as discursive, hegemonic, cultural systems, and the role of the market and marketers within this, in shaping our social, political and economic reality (Thompson et al., 2013). Our analysis shows that all sociotechnical imaginaries are partial, situated and exclusionary in multiple ways, and that they are also normative in assuming and advocating certain ideologies. We find that sociotechnical imaginaries thus provide us a critical tool for exposing the limitations of current discourses on, for example, economic growth due to technological innovation. They foreground the ‘integrated material, moral and social landscapes’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 3) that underlie these discourses. In this sense, analysing imaginaries is useful not in showing us what can be envisaged or imagined but rather in emphasising what is unimaginable and inconceivable as that is where the subversive potential of locating radical difference lies. Our dystopian narratives, in particular, allowed us to present some of these complex topographies of power and morality as they intersect with the forces of science and technology. We agree with Bradshaw et al. (2021) that dystopia is thus much more desirable than utopia. Further use of sociotechnical imaginaries in marketing could therefore provide the broader analytical frameworks called for by Askegaard and Linnet (2011); there is also significant scope for more material semiotic approaches to technologies, particularly given the virtual embodiment of VR.

Thirdly, we highlight the value of alternative modes of dissemination in order to communicate difficult-to-represent phenomena. An interactive narrative offers an interactive alternative to linear and spectatorial ways of exploring and presenting ideas, blurring the lines between storytelling and the participatory experience of interacting within a game system. Moreover, Twine is free and easily-accessible software which requires minimal hardware resources, works in any browser and can be customised. It is therefore accessible to a much broader audience than an academic paper and has significant promise for teaching purposes (see the Appendix for how to use the interactive narrative in class). We found the interactive narrative particularly useful to include diverse forms and contents and challenge often-exclusive scholarly methods and communication strategies. As Wilson and Saklofske (2019, p. 9) assert, Twine can ‘re-humanise, challenge and critique ideologies, pluralise perspectives, confront complexity and facilitate multiple models of perception and practice’. We thus follow Brownlie’s (2009, p. 410, citing Morgan, 1983) call for ‘a more reflective social science that tolerates diversity, ambiguity, contradiction and uncertainty’ in highlighting the subjective nature of data and analysis in any study of marketing and demonstrating that marketing is not a unified scholarly area or professional activity but formed of multiple, contesting claims.

In particular, we hope to foster more criticality through the multiple perspectives we could present through the interactive narrative by providing alternative, wider framings. Furthermore, by pointing out possible futures in our narrative, we also put current imaginaries up for discussion. Although, as we have shown, utopian perspectives on VR have abounded since its origins, rather than radical alternatives, VR replicates the power dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, serving to further invisibilise the power asymmetries of the proprietary platforms on which it is constructed. Perhaps this is the future which Ahlberg et al. (2021) claim is a foregone conclusion of late capitalism, derelict and not worthy of anticipation. This also raises the dynamics of influence between the individual and the structural, which the interactive narrative brings to the fore. Twine offers us a lens to consider how the broader conditions structure the individual experience in influencing the possible outcomes available, providing a consciousness which, as Askegaard and Linnet (2011) argue, collapses in the everyday moment-to-moment due to the complexity of social embedment. Players must make decisions that affect the narrative but these are constrained. Although our analysis sought to move away from the individual as the primary unit of analysis to focus on the structural in line with sociotechnical imaginaries, our interactive narrative is individualised, reflective of the data. The illusion of choice we offer to players serves to communicate the significance of the structural; in this sense, the choices are not ‘real’ choices as is the case in many of our market-mediated decision making, they are limited by powerful historical, political and social forces (Cherrier & Murray, 2007; Heiskanen & Pantzar, 1997; Hobson, 2002).

Finally, given that many of us have been compelled to adopt digital lives as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we note the increased interest in interactive narratives as a medium. While ours is simply textual, Netflix’s interest in interactive narratives demonstrates the potential for more visual approaches, best evidenced by Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch (2018), a film which offers countless meanderings through the story space due to 150 minutes of unique footage divided into 250 segments that can juxtaposed in various combinations by the viewer during streaming.² Bandersnatch won a number of awards, including, interestingly, ‘best game writing’ (Peters, 2019) and received significant media attention; within a day of its release, numerous Reddit threads and fan sites had created flowcharts to track the complex story paths of branching narratives (Carbone, 2018). Although Netflix has not released viewer figures, 94% of viewers made active choices while watching the film (Strause, 2019). This demonstrates a wider shift in terms of what constitutes viewership (or in our case, readership). As Ursu et al. (2020) argue, the rise in social media means that audiences now want to interact with and through content that is curated for them for more personalised experiences. Interaction can no longer be a mere add-on but must be at the heart of the experience.

Furthermore, if we stick to our macro-focus in examining technology, in a potentially dystopian twist, interactive narratives pave the way for new revenue streams for content creators in terms of how the data could be used as an internal programmatic marketing infrastructure. While Netflix’s value proposition is heavily centred around data gathering in terms of what viewers watch, when and for how long, interactive content could provide data on real-world decisions like product preference and musical tastes. In this way, interactive narratives are rather timely and deserve further investigation themselves. Perhaps they can even provide a glimpse into the future of the metaverse, that is, the virtual alternative to our physical universe within which people can interact socially and economically which is generally considered as the next iteration of the Internet (Baszucki, 2021). While gaming has been the province of such digital co-experiences, the need for innovative formats and new ways to reach audiences online means that we are seeing rapid expansion and interest from other actors, including commercial brands. The rise of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) demonstrates how quickly virtual assets are being monetised, again demonstrating the need for further theorisation of these multidimensional non-linear digital story world formats as well as the powers behind them, who have access to our data and interactions.

To conclude, in line with the editors of this special issue, we call for further exploration beyond the existing strictures of conventional journal submissions. Indeed, Tourish (2019) has highlighted the dangers of ‘useless’, formulaic research for management research, condemning incomprehensive and impenetrable papers. Brown and Kerrigan’s (2020) recent special issue of short stories testifies to the richness and insight that can be gained from alternative ways of presenting research. We hope that others will also follow this route less travelled.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2112610.Download the Zip file, then unzip or extract all and double click on Index.html to start the interactive narrative.

Additional information

Funding

We are extremely grateful that this work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/S002758/1 and by the British Academy under Grant PF2\180090

Notes on contributors

Chloe Preece

Dr Chloe Preece is Associate Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School. Her research is focused on notions of social, cultural and economic value, primarily in the arts and creative industries. In studying these fields, Chloe takes a critical perspective to analyse the ideological assumptions which underpin markets.

Laryssa Whittaker

Dr Laryssa Whittaker is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at StoryFutures, an AHRC/Innovate UK-funded research centre based at Royal Holloway, University of London, which links creative companies with academic research in immersive technology. Her doctoral research was in ethnomusicology, undertaking an ethnographic investigation of the contribution of South African music-centred youth development programmes to the multidimensional wellbeing of participants, analysed through the lenses of socioeconomic inequality and political economy. Her current research at StoryFutures focuses on audience insight, exploring attitudes, values and patterns of engagement regarding immersive media to understand the industry’s future audiences. She is undertaking a longitudinal youth audience study on home-use VR, and collaborates on multidisciplinary, mixed methods research supporting StoryFutures’ challenge projects and prototypes.

Stephanie Janes

Dr Stephanie Janes is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King’s College, London where she is currently researching the impact of immersive promotional media on brand/consumer relationships. Her research interests include promotional and digital cultures, film marketing, immersive media, and alternate reality games. Recent publications include Alternate Reality Games: Promotion and Participatory Culture (2019 Routledge) and ‘Promotional Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and the TINAG Philosophy’ in Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay, eds. Antero Garcia & Greg Niemeyer, Approaches to Digital Game Studies Series, (2017, Bloomsbury).

Notes

1. With only one exception the focus was on the Global North, mainly the US, followed by the UK and the EU.

2. Although it does not support time-based audio/video media, Twine was used in the development of the Bandersnatch script (Aggarwal, 2019).

Appendix

In order to aid educators in how to use the interactive narrative in their teaching we have provided some prompts for discussion. We suggest the students take note of the discussion questions and play the interactive narrative (either alone or in groups) and only read the article after the discussion.

Discussion Questions:

• 1. Sociotechnical imaginaries can be defined as collectively held and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology. What kinds of imaginaries can you distinguish in the interactive narrative?

• 2. What is the role of VR in these imaginaries?

• 3. What is the relationship between the market and these imaginaries?

• 4. What world views do you think these imaginaries lead to? What are the implications for the VR market and society more generally?

• 5. Which, if any, of these imaginaries do you identify with?

Now check if you identified the same imaginaries as we did by reading the article.