As news organisations seek new ways to engage audiences, immersive storytelling is likely to become a mainstream feature of journalism but what ethical challenges will it bring for news reporting?
Immersive storytelling has long been hailed as the next big trend in technology. Google reportedly shipped five million of its cardboard virtual reality viewers in 2015 and overall sales of virtual reality headsets are expected to reach 64.8 million within four years. The Knight Foundation reports that leading news organisations have engaged in significant experimentation with immersive storytelling over the past year.
Immersive storytelling comes in several formats: virtual reality allows people to enter alternative visual environments; augmented reality overlays virtual objects in the real world; and 360 video captures an entire scene in which the viewer can look up, down and around. Often, as in the Knight Foundation report, these formats are grouped together and discussed as virtual reality (VR).
Empathy Machines: Among practitioners, immersive storytelling is celebrated for its capacity to build deep empathetic connections with viewers. This capacity is supported by a growing body of research. Experiments at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab revealed that immersive storytelling enhances people’s ability to take on the perspective of others and influences their real world attitudes and behaviours. Writing on Medium, immersive storyteller Chris Milk describes VR as "the ultimate empathy machine":
VR eliminates the need for external frames. For the first time, the medium is no longer outside us, but within us. The paint is human experience and the canvas is our consciousness.
Unsurprisingly, immersive storytelling is frequently used to create first person simulations about humanitarian issues. The filmmakers behind the award-winning RYOT News share a background in NGO work rather than journalism. Last November, The New York Times distributed over 1 million cardboard VR viewers to accompany a short spherical video about displaced refugees.
Nonny de la Peña, the “godmother of virtual reality”, pioneered VR journalism with Project Syria, Hunger in LA, and Use of Force. Her company Emblematic Media is one of many immersive storytelling entities that partner with NGOs and news media to raise awareness about human rights and social issues.
A similar company Empathetic Media worked with The Washington Post to recreate the events that lead to the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. More recently, Empathetic Media partnered with the Serbian Red Cross to raise awareness about human slavery. The augmented reality project #STOPtrafficking2016 uses traffic stop signs as a trigger to reveal information about human trafficking and the stories of people affected by it. As Mădălina Ciobanu notes, similar augmented reality projects could be developed by news media to "turn any object into a trigger to release information".
Ethics and Standards: Immersive storytelling is clearly beneficial for advocacy organisations but its use in journalism is not as ethically clear. Tom Kent, standards editor at The Associated Press, argues:
Before the technology gallops any further, it’s time for an ethical reality check. How real is virtual reality intended to be? Where’s the line between actual event and the producer’s artistic license? Is VR journalism supposed to be the event itself, an artist’s conception of the event or something akin to a historical novel, “based on a true story”?
For Kent, the core ethical questions are about the authenticity and integrity of the simulation. Much like photojournalism, immersive storytelling presents difficult questions about the bias of what is shown and non-shown and the exploitation and trivialisation of human suffering. Calling for greater transparency in immersive storytelling, Kent argues that viewers need to know what's real, the extent of image modification and whether there are competing views of what happened.
For example, regarding the re-creation of dialogue, facial expressions and gestures, he asks: "Do they come from solid photographic and audio sources? The recollections of witnesses? Police reports? Or the producers’ own estimation of how the events likely occurred?" More pointedly, there are questions about the difficult lines between reporting a story and advocating a particular perspective.
Clearly, journalism’s job is to bring human drama alive for distant audiences. But creating empathy is a goal beyond just telling a story. If the ultimate aim is to create emotion, a journalist could be tempted to omit balancing or inconvenient information that could interfere with the desired emotional effect. In traditional media, too, the desire to paint a cause or a person in sympathetic tones can conflict with impartial, hard-headed reporting. But the potential for empathy is even greater in the VR world, since viewers can bond far more easily with a 3-D character they’re practically touching.
Beyond humanitarian issues, who will decide what level of partisan empathy is appropriate in war, politics or crime reporting? Standford University's Hollis Kool cautions that "VR environments could very well become incubators for propaganda and exploitation, and for this reason, being unaware of the journalist orchestrating highly persuasive content can be dangerous."
Immersive storytelling is undoubtedly an exciting development for journalism and the standardisation of techniques and ethical practices will go a long way to securing its legitimacy as a journalism format. As Thomas McMullan observes, "it may end up being the biggest transformation to face journalism since the birth of film." However, the controversies that continue to surround documentary journalism and photojournalism suggest that standardising the ethics of immersive storytelling will not be straightforward.
Cover Image: Project Syria (de la Peña, 2014)
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