As the infrastructure of spatial computing takes form, it will offer a home for XR journalism experiences. The news media is one of the critical layers of the spatial web — as Chapter 2 discussed, early innovations in XR journalism are gearing up for this transition. And they will be ready. The media logic of XR journalism lends itself perfectly to a spatially computed environment. Virtual reality journalism can provide fully immersive presence in remote spaces. Augmented reality journalism can be embedded in its proper context in the physical world.
XR journalism filling the spatially computed environment gives birth to a new kind of immersive public sphere. As mentioned in the Introduction, the public sphere is generally idealized as "a discursive space in which members of a community can discuss important matters of the day, and in which rational, reasoned debate would determine public opinion" [1]. That definition provided by the Data & Society Institute has been brokered over decades of scholarly discourse; the roots of the debate are often traced back to German theorist Jürgen Habermas. But my preferred version of the concept is Hannah Arendt's "public realm," elucidated in her 1958 book The Human Condition. For Arendt, the public realm has two basic meanings: the space of appearance and the place of the common world [2]. The public realm as a space of appearance provides the widest possible publicity to people; it is where you go to see and be seen. It is where you go to publicly express your individuality and your opinions among a plurality of other individuals. Inspired by the ancient polis, the Arendtian model describes how people emerge from the private realm and present themselves to one another — the conversation, debate, and brokerage between their individual opinions thus triggers political activity. Indeed, the concept of the public realm is inherently political; it is the place of rational discussion, the locus of political actions, and where power and authority emerge [3].
Secondly, the public realm is defined by its status as the common world: “signifying the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it” [4]. The public realm is a shared reality that rises above any single perspective: it is relevant to all of us. You can leave an impact on the common world during your mortal lifetime, but it will it still outlast you... you merely enter it when you are born and leave it behind when you die. Indeed, the news media are central to the nurturing both the space of appearance and the common world — their reporting informs citizens, recounts history, shares diverse perspectives, and reminds us that we are all accountable to one another in a shared reality.
In my reading, the Arendtian public realm has three defining characteristics: Relevance, plurality, and permanence. The three tenets inform my conception of immersive public spheres**.** This XR-mediated version of the public realm should permit user democracy and exploration, foreground different points of view, and constitute a sense of a permanent common world. I place a large haul of this burden on XR journalism... which is up against significant challenges. The contemporary reality is far from a single idealized public sphere; it is more of a ragged topography of fragmented sub- and counter-publics. XR journalism's task is to facilitate these smaller communities understanding each other, interacting, compromising, and feeding into a larger immersive public spheres. In this concluding chapter, I draw on Arendt to imagine the qualities of immersive public spheres, existing on top of the infrastructure discussed in Chapter 3. I offer a blueprint of how XR journalism can help foster a shared reality in which we all want to participate.
Arendt delineates publicly relevant information as the backbone of shared reality: “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves” [5]. In other words, the sense of a common world relies on the assumption that we are all looking at a somewhat shared set of facts. In the 20th century, the forces that determined what was publicly relevant took on many forms. In some cases, governments sponsored public radio, television, and newspapers to deliver information they wanted all of their constituents to see. In the United States, that responsibility has fallen on the independent fourth estate: Journalists impact politics by laying out front pages and deciding on lead stories for prime time broadcasts. Those stories that capture editorial attention and earned that stamp of front page material were once thought to be the relevant fodder for shared reality. This notion remains with those who get their information from mainstream news outlets directly.
But in 2020, social media algorithms have emerged as a viable competitor to be the determinate mechanism of relevance; platforms shifted the focus from public to personal relevance. Consider your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds: these algorithms order content based on what the platform thinks you want to see. Platforms quite literally feed you content that they bet will get a like out of you, withholding the agency to decide what you want to see first and paying little attention to information of a larger public significance. There is no public front page on Facebook; only billions of individual news feeds. Many of the challenges facing the contemporary press are in part consequences of this mathematical personalization: it entrenches filter bubbles and eases the spread of fake news; you lose sight of the fact that a headline might only be circulating in your small network. As Arendt would have feared, news feed algorithms render users “imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times" [6]. Algorithmically tailored content directly threatens the common world.
There are glaring issues with the aforementioned systems of encoding relevance. In each case, the power is taken away from the users, and instead centralized in the hands of government, the press, or social media companies. Each relevance system has its own complicated politics and power dynamics. On the unclaimed terrain of the spatial internet, these conflicting modes will fight for influence over public opinion. But if not governments, the press, or Facebook, than who will operate the sorting system for the spatial Internet's limitless digital layers in public spaces? When you walk into Times Square, which contextualized information populates first? Do you first see government messaging, news stories, advertisements, games, social media posts, or restaurant reviews? Do you see all of that digital content at once?
A newly immersive public sphere offers the opportunity to reconfigure the mechanisms of relevance... and give agency to the public themselves. User agency and exploration is central to the media logic of immersive media: in AR stories like Time's Amazon Rain Forest, users control which hotspots they select, what type of media they consume, and are free to walk around the model [7]. In The Guardian's VR piece 6x9, users customize their experience based on where they look in the tiny solitary confinement cell [8]. In Emblematic Group's VR story Greenland Melting, the user's six degrees of freedom permit them to explore the changing landscape at their own pace [9]. 6DoF experiences value user agency; they are incompatible with linear storytelling, news feeds, and algorithmic personalization. XR journalism reconfigures interaction with the public sphere; users expect agency to impact and customize their own experience.
<aside> 💡 When you walk into Times Square with your XR device, a series of categories should spawn in your field of view. Consider games, shopping, news, social media, or history. These are the highest level of organizing layers for augmented experiences that are pinned to Times Square; you can narrow the scope at will. Within "News," you might see options for the New York Times, New York Post, Fox News, or Citizen Reporting. Select your category and narrow your search with your voice: "Show me New York Times stories relevant to this area." The organization of the ensuing options is not pre-ordained by the government, specified by the New York Times, or algorithmically personalized to you. Within each successive layer, the ordering mechanism should be user engagement: the options that appear larger in your field of view should be those experiences that earned the most user views, participation, and reaction. In other words, those experiences that were most relevant to others. Indeed, you are in charge of what you see and hear: but at every turn of the selection process, you are reasssured of the presence of others who are seeing what you are seeing and hearing what you are hearing. You are sharing an extended reality.
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In this imagination, there are systems to encode two types of relevance: public and contextual. The method of public relevance is inspired by Reddit, a news aggregator and social network: its tagline is "the front page of the internet" [10]. User-generated content is organized by what's most popular, hot, and trending. It is then divided into over a million communities — subreddits like r/worldnews or r/aww, where you go to see aggregated content that speak to those particular interests. These are mini spaces of appearance, where you go to express yourself and witness others' expression. If you visit Reddit without an account, there is no algorithmic personalization; within each successive subreddit, users see content organized by popularity. There are communities for serious journalistic discussion and cute cat videos alike, users for both anonymous individuals and publications. You click around the site, diving deeper into rabbit holes of your choosing. When you create an account, you're given the extra degree of freedom to dole out up and down votes, post, comment, and engage with the digital public sphere. In its core mission, Reddit foregrounds user democracy and gives you ultimate freedom to explore smaller spaces of appearance.
Reddit home page screenshot, as advertised by the company on redditinc.com.
To be clear, I am not advocating for replicating Reddit exactly in the spatial internet. What I am advocating for is an immersive public sphere that takes the best of Reddit — the layered communities, political debate, user democracy, and visitor agency — and works to leave behind many of its flaws. Reddit has drawn criticism for its lack of demographic diversity: The Daily Beast reports that 74 percent of Reddit users are men, the highest of any social networking website [11]. It has been a home to very polarizing, hateful subreddits, which were censored by the platform. Moreover, the purely democratic marketing of the site belies a hidden organizational element of Reddit: the Washington Post reports that "Behind the Internet’s great trend-machine sits a complex, faceless hierarchy of volunteer moderators, called 'mods'" [12]. The Post explains that each subreddit's moderator deletes spam and blocks disruptive members: but these anonymous mods can also delete posts they don't like, or shirk their moderation responsibilities altogether. The presence (and often absence) of mods is a reminder that all of these public spheres are moderated by someone or something; delineating the power to control is selecting the lesser of many evils.
This is where Apple News enters the conversation as a complementary inspiration. It is a news aggregator that combines user agency with editor-curated content. On a high level, Apple News offers a "Today" home page that aggregates stories chosen by editors, and then lists "Trending" stories determined by user engagement [13]. You select categories and publications that interest you, just like with Reddit — Politics, Technology, Travel, Sports, New York Times, The Daily Show. Each category has its own page, but instead of user-generated content organized by popularity, you see major publication content organized by Apple's team of editors. Notice, too, the editors' attempt at offering political diversity with Fox News, CNN, and NPR represented. If you do want algorthmically tailored content, the "For You" section learns from your history on the platform. The trade-off with Apple News is endowing their team of editors with the power to show you content on its front page; even dubbing them editors on the landing page reveals that Apple is honest about the technology company taking on the traditional role of a publisher [14]. What it's missing is the sense of user-generation and active debate that characterizes Reddit's public sphere.
Screenshot from the author's personal Apple News dashboard.
Screenshot from the author's personal Apple News dashboard.
Screenshot from the author's personal Apple News dashboard.
