Can Immersive Journalism Enhance Empathy

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 Pena 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 Pena’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 f...

[1]  M. Hoffman.  Empathy and moral development : implications for caring and justice , 2000 .

[2]  Christian B. Miller.  Empathy, social psychology, and global helping traits , 2009 .

[3]  Mel Slater,et al.  Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News , 2010, PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.

[4]  M. Nowak.  The Complicated History of Einfühlung , 2011 .

[5]  D. Zahavi.  Empathy and Other-Directed Intentionality , 2014 .

[6]  P. Ellsworth,et al.  An appraisal theory of empathy and other vicarious emotional experiences. , 2015, Psychological review.

[7]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought , 1999 .

[8]  M. Brüne,et al.  Towards a neuroscience of empathy: Ontogeny, phylogeny, brain mechanisms, context and psychopathology , 2013, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[9]  Christian B. Miller.  DEFINING EMPATHY: THOUGHTS ON COPLAN'S APPROACH , 2011 .

[10]  Eva Domínguez-Martín,et al.  Periodismo inmersivo o cómo la realidad virtual y el videojuego influyen en la interfaz e interactividad del relato de actualidad , 2015 .

[11]  M. Hoffman.  How automatic and representational is empathy, and why , 2001 .

[12]  Richard Szeliski,et al.  Video mosaics for virtual environments , 1996, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[13]  R. Brandt.  The Psychology of Benevolence and its Implications for Philosophy , 1976 .

[14]  Peggy Weil,et al.  Avatar mediated cinema , 2008, ACE '08.

[15]  B. Thirioux,et al.  Note sur l'origine de l'empathie , 2008 .

[16]  Shenchang Eric Chen,et al.  QuickTime VR: an image-based approach to virtual environment navigation , 1995, SIGGRAPH.

[17]  Amy Coplan,et al.  WILL THE REAL EMPATHY PLEASE STAND UP? A CASE FOR A NARROW CONCEPTUALIZATION , 2011 .

[18]  K. Ochsner,et al.  The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise , 2012, Nature Neuroscience.

[19]  Maria V. Sanchez-Vives,et al.  First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality , 2010, PloS one.

[20]  Ada Sonia Peter,et al.  The Elements of Journalism , 2013 .