Can Immersive Journalism Enhance Empathy?

Abstract

Major news outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian have recently launched ambitious immersive journalism projects. Adopting the technologies and rhetoric of immersive journalism first presented by Nonny de la Peña in 2010, these news outlets seek to use virtual reality and 360 video to create deeper engagement and empathy with their audiences. Yet can immersive journalism enhance empathy? This question is unanswerable without a thorough discussion of the concept of empathy, a discussion that so far has been missing in the academic literature and popular commentary. This article addresses the gap by presenting current debates about the definition of empathy and using these debates to critically assess de la Peña’s immersive journalism projects “IPSRESS” and “Hunger in Los Angeles,” and the recent New York Times “The Displaced” and Guardian’s “6 × 9” immersive journalism projects. The conclusion is twofold: On the one hand, I will argue that some immersive journalism projects are approaching a format that may enhance empathy, and on the other hand, I will propose that the project of immersive journalism needs to go beyond this goal and into adopting a more forceful role in shaping the future of virtual reality.

KEYWORDS:

• empathy
• immersive journalism
• journalism ethics
• media philosophy
• virtual reality
• 360 video

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Virtual reality in this article is used to refer to both 3D synthetic worlds and 360 video. However, Wired Magazine author Will Smith has commented on the potential pitfalls of calling 360 video projects “VR” (Smith 2015). Smith argues that the low-definition 360 video experiences that The New York Times offers through NYT VR and Google Cardboard should not be called VR because they can give virtual reality a bad reputation. For Smith, 360 videos on the Cardboard are far from the kind of seamless experiences that higher-end 3D-driven headsets such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive can offer. Yet one could argue that the discussion is somewhat misplaced, in the sense that before the launch of the higher-end headsets that have become available in recent years, lower resolution and slower tracking response did not prevent researchers and developers from using “virtual reality” to refer to a much broader range of technologies using head-mounted displays, and as of 2017, the various technologies are still commonly grouped as part of a broad definition of “virtual reality” (Chen 1995; Szeliski 1996; Marconi and Nakagawa 2017).

2. The discussion of this project is based both on de la Peña’s paper and on a video documentation of the project published by de la Peña on Youtube on July 15, 2009, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z8pSTMfGSo.

3. I base my account of Hunger in Los Angeles on video documentations of the project posted on August 15, 2013, in Nonny de la Peña’s Immersive Journalism website, available at http://www.immersivejournalism.com/hunger-in-los-angeles-machinima-video/ and on experiencing the project in an HTC Vive VR headset in 2017.