The Ethics of VR Documentary
Documentarists engaging with VR encounter ethical issues common to traditional documentary practice. Additionally, VR documentary gives rise to specific ethical challenges relating to the psychological implications of immersion for users, to data extraction and privacy, and associated with the claim that immersion in real world content has unique prosocial potential. In this lecture, Mandy Rose will unpack the domains in which VR provokes novel or specific issues for documentary practice, and discuss how a toolkit might support VR nonfiction practitioners in thinking through the ethics of their work. The lecture reflects research undertaken within the EPSRC Virtual Realities; Immersive Documentary Encounters project.
Mandy Rose is Professor of Documentary & Digital Cultures at UWE Bristol, co-convener of the i-Docs Symposium, and co-investigator on the EPSRC Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters research project. Previously, she spent twenty years at BBC, where she oversaw award-winning interactive and participatory media projects including BBC 2’s ground- breaking Video Nation project and the Capture Wales digital storytelling project. She is co-editor of the book i-docs: The evolving practices of interactive documentary, published by Wallflower Press in 2017. Her recent writing on VR nonfiction appears in Studies in Documentary Film and World Records.