Between Immersion and Deimmersion. Adaptation to 360° Technology in The New York Times Daily 360

ABSTRACT

In recent years, many journalistic organisations have experimented with 360° video technology. One of the reasons for the interest is its potential ability to facilitate the public’s emotional engagement. However, this seems to come into conflict with the prevailing idea that news should be presented in an emotionally detached manner. The New York Times is a media outlet that, more than most, conjures up notions of professional and high-quality journalism. The present article chooses the NYT Daily 360 project as a case study to examine the tension between traditional journalist ethics and the emotional bias that seems to characterise immersive technology. We conducted a content analysis to identify the elements that, by emphasizing the mediation between the user and the narrated facts, generate a “deimmersion” effect. As a result, we have observed that, in general, the immersive properties of the videos tend to be mitigated by resources with an opposite effect. Reasoning from this compromise solution between immediacy and hypermediacy, the discussion is based on the problem of the distance between the user and the narrator. To this end, reference is made to theoretical tools from journalism and media studies as well as from art history, literary studies, and semiotics.

KEYWORDS:

• 360-degree videos
• NYT Daily 360
• immersion
• distance
• emotional engagement
• journalistic ethics

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Something that deserves a separate mention is the notion of the “viewpoint”, given that various analyses claim that the level of immersion is increased if the view of the user is placed at the standard height of a person’s eyes (Benítez de Gracia and Herrera Damas 2019). However, we believe that this perspective can come with some contradiction with regards to the immersive experience. Specifically, we believe that a higher or lower viewpoint, while violating the classically “realistic” representation, does not necessarily bring about a lesser sense of self-absorption. Furthermore, this notion dismisses the possibility of taking on a different kind of viewpoint, such as that of a child, animal or object. In any case, the vast majority of NYT Daily 360 pieces maintain a camera height that corresponds with a standard human viewpoint. In fact, the atypical viewpoints that appear in 20.4% of the pieces last only a few seconds and rarely tend to deviate from the hypothetically ideal eye height. For all these reasons, we decided to exclude this criterion from our analysis.

2 In line with this, we come across sporting activities and celebrations (“Shadow Runners in the N.Y.C. Marathon” and “Patriots Fans Dance in the Streets”, among others), political events (“French Election: The Moment Emmanuel Macron Won”, “Little Havana Reacts to Fidel Castro’s Death” and “Inside the Trump Victory Party”), religious and popular festivals (“Christmas in Bethlehem”, “A Christmas Carol Fit for a Cathedral” and “Lighting Up the Sky Across the Globe”), and protest marches (“In Solidarity: Women’s Marches Across the World”).

3 Benjamin recovers the concept of “tactile perception” or “haptic perception” (from the Greek haptein, “to tie”) from the work of art historian Alois Riegl, who precisely distinguishes this from “optical perception” in Late Roman Art Industry (1985). This opposition is closely related to the visual relationship between “close” and “far”: on one hand, the near or haptic view is similar to tactile perception, given that various pieces of discontinuous sensory data must be mentally assimilated; on the other hand, the distant or optical view takes in a synoptic panorama of objects in space.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain under Grant PGC2018-098984-B-I00.

Notes on contributors

Rayco González

Rayco González, PhD, teaches at the University of Burgos. His main works focus on semiotics and cultural semiotics. Among other subjects, he has written about documentary comics, TV series, political communication and suspicion. Web: https://investigacion.ubu.es/investigadores/35222/detalle

Marcello Serra

Marcello Serra, PhD, teaches at the Carlos III University of Madrid and his main interests are in semiotics and media theory. Among other subjects, he has written about comics, popular culture, political communication, and transparency. Web: https://portal.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/dpto_periodismo_comunicacion_audiovisual/periodismo/personal/marcello_serra; Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcello_serra