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

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.

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