360 Video: Is this Ethical?
By Aminah Usman
A 360-degree video allows the audience member to look to the front, back, left, right, above, and below them. The audience has to move the video around in order to see all the things going on. This form of storytelling paints itself as exciting and enticing, however, the question of whether it is ethical in reference to producing news is pivotal.
A 360-degree video must be placed in a specific location which in turn limits how a Journalist can tell stories. To be quite frank, most of the places a 360-degree video is utilized is during “dangerous/exciting place.” In my opinion, this is one of the reasons it can be as unethical.
Watching The Fight for Falluja | 360 VR Video | The New York Times was really hard. This is the kind of reporting that leads 360 videos to be unethical. How and why would it ever be okay to watch people fight in a war? It is a gruesome way to report for the probability of seeing dead bodies is at a higher risk. No one should be exposed to such violence, for the simple fact that the more people see it, the more it is normalized.
However, when watching the I Am Rohingya video, it proved 360 videos have the potential to be ethical and interesting. The viewer's ability to see everything around them was pivotal to the story being told. As Rohingya was stating she only had one clothes for all her children, we were also able to see her kids naked waiting for their clothes to dry. The 360 videos allowed journalists to implement empathy through this form of reporting.
However, according to, Zahra Rasool stated “ Empathy is not exclusive to the 360/VR medium. Audiences can see powerful images or watch a great 2D linear documentary that can evoke just as much empathy. The danger is that using empathy as the major avenue for telling VR stories can lead to emphasizing the subject as a conduit for emotion, rather than a real person whose life has been impacted by local and international events.”
