Journalism in the Age of Virtual Reality How Experiential Media are
Experiential media: we can call it the experience made by users when they will watch, listen and at the same time appreciate with great impact an I-Doc or something else created for a complete, fluid interaction of the user with the material posted online or seen somewhere else.
This book focuses the attention on new medias and what it means and will mean virtual reality, drones, new and more technological smartphones for the common journalistic work, and the highest, more under many ways beautiful impact on masses.
You musn't think that this one is a novelty.
No: nothing new after all in the horizon. What I want to say is that journalism has known a lot of revolutions.
Let's just imagine what happened the entrance in scene of photography for newsmagazines, magazine and its commixtion with a written piece close to it.
Photography co-reported with the piece written by the reporter every news. Amuder, a wedding, a funeral, a session at the town hall council. Everything.
With the decades cameras became always more sophisticated and were in grade of giving new answers to pieces, creating by themselves real journalistic impact.
At the moment, there are so many devices in grade of presenting us reality and what it is going on often happen in real-time thanks to smartphones of common users.
In general common people tend to post on the various social medias. People of course sometimes can't produce a great product, but smartphone and their power is constantly increasing and it means that we will always more sophisticated, clear imagines, pictures obstained also by a private citizen.
Connected devices will be fifty billion at the end of this year. Journalism, thanks to these new and powerful instruments will change again, living a new, and fresh existence.
This, will involve all sectors of journalism, starting with sport, thanks to sensors added in various devices in grade of capturing the most, but experiential stories, as also told by the author are not just incredibly interesting but they were unthinkable till at recent decades.
Problems are many of course: cyberattacks is one of them. Most companies have been attacked; plus there is a world populated by fake news, or news of bad quality; protecting this experiential news from manipulation will be crucial.
Being in fact multisensorial news, the impact on people will be more intense at different levels than not common news .
These news if manipulated can lead at shocks and other strong feelings folk, masses. That's why the thematic must be taken seriously.
For sure journalists at the moment (and in the future) have powerful tools for reporting news with high impact.
These instruments include high-resolution, immersive audio, video material; all five senses of people will be involved.
Journalism will become more individualist thanks to the voice of a single person speaking in a multiple version for giving a resonant news.
It will be possible, as also it was done in the past to trying to tell under many different perspective the same news for an higher impact.
In an experiment at the Pennsylvania State University researchers noticed that the participants at the project weremulti-sensorially touched, experienced great and strong emotions and felt a lot of participation and empathy.
What other instruments of power will have or have in his hand the journalist?
The I-Docs, the so-called "interactives" is one of the best form of a new emergent form of journalism; visual frame, panoramic image, and a video as a center of the story.You can google The New York Times and the I-Doc Snow Fall for having an idea. The I-Docs are beautiful because they mix medias and all these medias create an unicum, impressive work.
Thanks to this book you will learn the importance of I-Docs and new medias and why it is so crucial jumping in this train as soon as possible.
Pavlik doesn't neglect any new voice; a chapter is dedicated to drone media as well.
Journalism won't never die, also in the most traditional shape to my point of view, but reality will be seen, read, discovered, amplified, let me use this verb, in all its complexity also thanks to new medias and it's important to discovering what it is waiting for the category and what it still exists and just is waiting for us.
Beautiful, this book is for everyone, great fruibility, written with passion, love, clarity, high competence, devotion for the topic.
Highly recommended.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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