News Redux

"We hope that through our virtual newsroom users will be able to connect better with the day’s news stories, leading to a greater understanding of the real world." -- Sky News Head of News John Ryley

News is bad enough these days, what with wars, shootings, psycho celebrity parents and Paris Hilton getting fitted for an L.A. County Jail jumpsuit, it’s hard to believe anyone would want to recreate any of it. Yet that’s exactly what Britain’s Sky News says it plans to do as part of its June launch in Second Life.

Linda Zimmer of Business Communicators of Second Life pulls out a key statement from the official Sky News announcement, noting that “Sky News apparently plans to recreate news-worthy events, such as ‘court cases, crime scenes and natural disasters’ to provide a ‘deeper understanding of the issues.’ ”

Linda goes on:

“As 3D spaces become more accessible to content creators and audiences, content will become animated, 360-degree, un-flat, multi-dimensional and multimedia. This applies as richly to news as it does to other forms of communications.”

I agree – but there is another, perhaps larger question. Does recreating news in a 3D space change our perceptions of the original, “real” news event? Will we “see” things differently, better understand other points of view, or react in different ways because we have experienced the news “firsthand” rather than as a passive observer?

The answer, at least in part, depends on whether you believe the 3D person inside Second Life is an extension of you or something “other” than you. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of behavioral psychology, the truth is we are our avatars and they are us. Our actions and experiences online can have a deep and profound effect on our real lives – including how we understand news, or perhaps even changing news itself.

For now, of course, no one knows whether Sky News’ virtual experiment will affect real news. But if it does, the change will have less to do with Second Life’s technology than with the authentic human emotions this same technology inspires.

Put another way, technology is like the heart, a machine pumping binary blood through digital veins. And like blood, technology by itself is cold. So is news when left alone.

But emotions are the soul – they are what make us greater than machines. And news with a soul is something today’s journalism is sorely missing. Second Life may just help journalism get its soul back.

Comments

[Linda]

Gary, thanks for spreading some pixel dust on this.

I'm anticipating how this will unfold and have high hopes for how Sky News implements this.

I was being questioned a few weeks ago in SL by a student in New York wondering how virtul worlds might change activism. I commented to her that people have to care before they will take action and that VWs offered a new way to inform and then to touch people. It is a way to get people to experience and care about important issues of our day.

But it will be important for journalistic practices to find ways to keep "fair and balanced" in whatever is to be the evolution of "experiential" news (my term!). :-0