Abstract
This book offers a roadmap for achieving journalistic excellence in experiential news media, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality, interactive audio devices, drones, data-driven platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). John V. Pavlik, the author, encourages readers to critically examine these journalistic innovations without adopting deterministic viewpoint. He succinctly explains experiential technologies and their broader implications on the profession and public, arguing that the responsible use of experiential media can consolidate democracy by guiding societies on a collaborative course in pursuit of the truth.
The book is organized in eight chapters. Pavlik starts with providing a historical context for experiential news media, in which wearables, for instance, date back to at least 17th-century China. He introduces six principles of design in experiential news in the second chapter before exploring the immersive, interactive and multisensory nature of user experience in the third chapter. Pavlik then delves into the evolving relationship between journalism and computing in chapter 4, offers an analytical framework to examine different forms of experiential journalistic content in chapter 5, and explores drone, its origin and potential in chapter 6. He ends his book with an extensive exploration of economic, legal and ethical factors shaping the future of experiential media before overlaying a moral framework to guide journalistic use of these technologies in chapters 7 and 8.
Pavlik raises several interesting points within the book. He discusses how an immersive, interactive and multisensory experience of VR increases the users’ tendency to believe the content to be real or at least a truthful representation of reality, distracting them from maintaining a critical eye on the content. VR can easily be a tool for propaganda and deception with such a powerful experiential aspect. Journalists must adhere to the highest ethical standards, resist technology temptations and only use experiential media when they add to the reporting. The book then extensively discusses the ethical implications of experiential media, offering a moral framework in the form of a parable that summarizes principles for life in a news environment transformed by VR and other journalistic innovations.
Computing, for instance, is another constantly evolving journalistic innovation. Pavlik examines the current trend of content personalization enabled by computing and its relation to the public service role of journalism, differentiating between automated personalization of factual data and of experiential stories. Customizable factual information, Pavlik argues, is a form of public-service-oriented journalism, in which individuals can make decisions based on reliable personalized information. They learn what each piece of information means on the individual level and the community level at large. However, personalized story experiences, the book argues, may increasingly fragment the public and lead to even greater political polarization and culture wars. Pavlik therefore calls on news organization to be transparent about their use of algorithms and to protect users’ privacy from potential political and commercial exploitation.
Such balanced perspective persists throughout the book as it explores journalistic innovations as actors interplaying with other actors in the journalistic network within economic, regulatory and ethical contexts. For instance, Pavlik argues that AI can work untiringly and rapidly but it lacks the capacity for critical thinking and empathy, increasing the likelihood of making mistakes that human common sense can easily detect. However, current development in cognitive computing, he points out, is moving towards integrating critical thinking abilities, suggesting the possibility for the enhanced AI to serve as a powerful assistant to an investigative reporter in the realm of fact-checking and experiential reporting. However, these technological advancements would still raise big regulatory and ethical issues, such as the question of Lewis et al. (2019): What if AI commits libel?
There are discussions of several hypothetical situations throughout the book to highlight the potential use of recent developments in experiential media. It includes up-to-date accounts of recent developments in several fields, including gaming and computing to examine how journalists can benefit from them. Pavlik suggests potential socio-political implications for digital innovation and invites future research to further examine these implications, in an attempt to maintain the Fourth Estate role of journalism.
This book is a must read for both academics and professionals interested in experiential digital innovations in journalism. It provides comprehensive accounts of the latest experiential media: their origins, design, journalistic uses, implications and key factors shaping their future. Scholars can use the proposed analytical framework to analyse experiential media, and professionals can extract from the presented moral parable an ethical framework to guide their practice in the age of experiential news.