Sid A.; November 9th, 2020
Note: This post is a reprint of a blog post for a philosophy class on the effects of virtual reality advertising on our knowledge of the world. The original post, from October 6th, 2020, can be found at this address: https://sapr89449075.wordpress.com/
Virtual Reality: Advertising 2.0
“[Critical] for new effective personalized advertising experiences is the ability of new technologies to allow for interactivity …”
– “Interactive Advertising and Presence” by Lombard and Snyder-Duch
Advertising goes hand in hand with the Internet. Every search we make is used to modify the ads we see, and every ad we see modifies our search patterns. In both subtle and obvious ways, advertising shapes almost every piece of knowledge we acquire from the Internet. Now, advertising and data giants, such as Google, are turning their sights to the realm of virtual reality (VR).
Image Source: https://makewebbetter.com/blog/techniques-to-create-highest-performing-google-search-ads/
Virtual reality is an old idea and a new phenomenon. The modern idea of virtual reality systems can be traced back to the 1960’s when the first headsets were being created, with brain-machine-interface (BMI) systems appearing in fiction near the same time. However, we have now entered an era where truly immersive virtual worlds are within our grasp. It is commonly thought that we will have full-sensory immersion systems between 10-30 years from now, and full BMI based virtual realities before the end of the century. This raises significant ethical, metaphysical, and even epistemological questions. In this post, I want to focus on a particular epistemic question: how does advertising in a virtual world affect our knowledge of what is real and not?
Advertising systems have already been created for popular VR systems such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. They are promising a new sort of advertising, one that is completely personalized and highly interactive. This could have epistemic impacts even more significant than those we have seen with traditional advertising.
Source: https://www.roadtovr.com/htcs-new-vr-ad-service-can-tell-youve-looked-ad-not/
In this case, I would like to evaluate how virtual advertising plays into the concept of cartesian skepticism. If our entire world is filtered by these highly personalized and interactive ads, then can we know anything?
The advertising industry already plays a role not unlike the devil that Descartes envisions. We usually will believe the information contained in the first few links that Google feeds us, accepting its reality without question. Unfortunately for our knowledge, the links we see are heavily determined by what we have searched for in the past, what products we buy, and where we spend our time on the web. And those factors are determined by the ads we see. It is a vicious cycle, that slowly corrodes our ability to find knowledge on the Internet. Now imagine a virtual world, filled with such advertisements. Here is an example of VR being used to promote a product:
If you want more examples, check out this blog (Lowe’s Holoroom is an interesting one): https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/vr-marketing-examples
These pieces of personalized, interactive experience would most likely completely ensnare us. There would be little hope for our already struggling internal “fact-finders”, the apple sorters that Lynch discusses, to discern fact from fiction. Ads, be they for products, services, or politics would gain more influence over our knowledge than ever before. Descartes’ devil could become a reality, but this time it with mastery of the art of manipulating even our thought, the last thing that keepsus grounded in truth.
Citations:
Matthew Lombard & Jennifer Snyder-Duch (2001) Interactive Advertising and Presence, Journal of Interactive Advertising, 1:2, 56-65, DOI: 10.1080/15252019.2001.10722051