Bons 1

The ethics of mediated empathy; Virtual reality and Debord’s Society of the
Spectacle
Kathryn Bons
Jack Silberman, Michael Thoma
MOPA 409-02
Dec 15, 2020

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Kathryn Bons
MOPA 409-02
Jack Silberman, Michael Thoma
Dec 15, 2020

The ethics of mediated empathy; Virtual reality and Debord’s Society of the
Spectacle
After Facebook acquired the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2014, Mark
Zuckerberg provided an official comment: “Strategically, we want to start building the
next major computing platform that will come after mobile” (as qtd in Parkin). Oculus’
publicity release contained a similar sentiment: “We believe communication drives new
platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world and we both see
virtual reality as the next step” (as qtd in Parkin). It would seem Zuckerberg and the
heads of Oculus are banking on virtual reality’s exciting capacity for total immersion to
revolutionize the nature of contemporary human social interaction. The technology’s
potential to overshadow limited two-dimensional narratives has also furthered its status
as the “ultimate empathy machine” (“Chris Milk,” 03:12-03:13). Contributing to the
claim that virtual reality technology allows participants to inhabit and identify “the
emotional experience of another via technology” (Bollmer 63), are immersive nonfiction projects, such as The Machine to Be Another (2012), which allows participants
to virtually inhabit another age or gender, and Notes on Blindness (2016), which places
users in the simulated world of a non-sighted person.
While proponents of VR claim the rapidly-advancing technology marks
humanity’s entrance into a new, prosocial era of empathic understanding, the use of

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this technology to simulate the personal experiences of another through the view of a
head-mounted display (HMD) has also been challenged. Critics go on to argue there
are also inherent problems associated with eliciting empathic experiences within a
commercial virtual spectacle. In his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle, Guy
Debord offers reflections regarding capitalist society’s rampant inversion of what is real
and what is false representation. “In societies where modern conditions of production
prevail,” Debord writes, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles” (119). Considering that the market for virtual and augmented reality
technologies is predicated to reach 72.8 billion USD by 2024 (Tankovska), VR seems
poised to flood the visual media industry, bringing with it the wholesome promise of
authentic human connection. In an age in which social interactions are increasingly
filtered through a cluttering of technologies, however, can yet another digitally
mediated viewpoint allow for the empathetic understanding of another’s lived
experience and emotional life? Is VR truly an emerging “empathy machine” (“Chris
Milk,” 03:12-03:13)? Or is this “psychologically advanced medium” (Bailenson 12) just
the latest iteration of Debord’s commodified spectacle?

EMOTIONAL RESONANCE IN VISUAL MEDIA
Visual media has an undeniable capacity to evoke powerful emotions in the
viewer (although how exactly this occurs continues to be widely debated). One of the
first to recognize the affective power of the cinema was German-American
psychologist Hugo Munsterburg, who wrote, “The visual perception … of these
emotions fuses in our minds with the conscious awareness of the emotion expressed;

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we feel as if we were directly seeing and observing the emotion itself” (qtd in Rosca
73). Film theoretician Bela Balázs further investigated this sense of psychological
embodiment, opening the doors for the study of emotional spectatorship. As Balázs
claims, "In the cinema … we are seeing everything from the inside as it were and are
surrounded by the characters of the film. They need not tell us what they feel, for we
see what they see and see it as they see it” (qtd in Rosca 103). According to Balázs,
the viewer is required to project themselves into the framed narrative in order to identify
with a film’s characters. Although there are many differing interpretations of this
phenomenon, Balázs’ concept of “identification” seems to best account for an
audience’s emotional connection with the characters onscreen. Balázs’ infers that, in
order for spectator engagement to occur, there must be a reduction of the “distance
between the spectator and the work of art” (qtd in Rosca 104). Interestingly, this seems
to echo VR’s immersive character which does away with this psychological separation
altogether.
Where traditional filmic storytelling requires the spectator to actively project
themselves into the world of the film, VR’s frameless perspective breaks the
“dictatorship of the frame” (“Carne y Arena: Art and Technology,” 16:25-16:30) and
envelops the viewer within a 360 degree environment. This sense of “being there,”
commonly referred to as “presence,” is a vital part of convincing a user they are truly
inhabiting a virtual space. Adrianao D’Aloia writes of the emerging medium’s limitless
field-of-view: “[VR] simultaneously offers a mental extension that is a media extension
(the medium subsumes the body and by taking it somewhere else, in fact does away
with it) and a mental incorporation that is a media incorporation (the body appropriates

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the medium in an almost organic way, and in doing so does away with it: the screen is
everywhere and therefore no longer exists) (para 23). This sensorial immersion also
increases a user’s perspective-taking ability by eliminating outside distractions. This
inevitably leads to a more immediate, empathic connection with the characters
encountered inside these experiences — or so proponents of VR ardently maintain.
In a 2015 TED Talk, VR champion and developer, Chris Milk, made several
prophetic statements about the future of virtual reality in which he distinguished it from
other forms of visual media. Speaking of his short 360 degree documentary, Clouds
Over Sidra (2015), which details a child’s experience in a refugee camp, Milk says,
When you're sitting there, in [Sidra’s] room, watching her, you're not watching it
through a television screen, you're not watching it through a window — you're
sitting there with her. When you look down, you're sitting on the same ground
that she's sitting on. And because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper
way. You empathize with her in a deeper way” (“Chris Milk,” 07:39-08:03).
Since Milk’s talk, further iterations of these sentiments — virtual reality as “empathy at
scale” (Bailenson 93) or an “intimacy engine” (Rubin 16)— have entered into
discussions regarding the virtues of this emerging visual medium.
EMPATHY
When examining the phenomenon of empathy, as Milk presents it, the depth of
the concept is not immediately apparent. Further examination of this notoriously
complex idea may offer some insight into the challenges of assigning meaningful
interpersonal connection through an as yet underdeveloped technology.

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Common understandings of empathy often include well-worn tropes, such as
“walking in another’s shoes” or “seeing through their eyes.” A working definition of
empathy might also be understood as the “capacity to let aside self-centred concerns
and entertain the perspective of another individual” (Rosca 54). However, the concept
has a tangled history involving many diverging interdisciplinary approaches. While an
ethical and philosophical interest in the emotional lives of others can be traced back
throughout the writings of Aristotle, Adam Smith and David Hume, the modern notion
of empathy first originated from the nineteenth century German aesthetic theory term,
“Einfühlung” — the sensation of “feeling-into” a beautiful work of art. Twentieth century
philosopher Theodor Lipps was one of the first to apply this theory of emotional
embodiment with inanimate art to human experiences when he began recording his
observations of human gesture and noticed an instinct within himself to mimic the
observed movement (Bollmer 73). Since Lipps’ “simulation-projection” model, the
conceptualization of empathy has continued to grow in complexity, expanding into the
realms of psychology, film theory and neuroscience. In a recent article, Amy Coplan
argues for a more cohesive and streamlined definition of empathy which distinguishes
between “emotional contagion” (Coplan 44), which is similar to Lipp’s theory of
unconscious ‘other mirroring,’ “pseudo-empathy” (44), inward or self-oriented
perspective taking, and “empathy proper,” outward or other-oriented perspective
taking (44). These important distinctions help clarify some of the underlying confusion
surrounding the buzz word employed today.
According to Coplan, “empathy proper” — the form of empathy frequently
appearing in discussions of virtual reality — is concerned with the intentional simulation

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of “another’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self–other
differentiation” (44). As Coplan states, this “other- focused” conceptualization of
empathy requires a concentrated level of effort and must be “generated from
within” (59). “Genuine empathy is difficult to achieve,” Coplan writes, "It is a motivated
and controlled process which is neither automatic nor involuntary” (58). She adds that
this other-oriented form of perspective-taking is significantly more challenging to
achieve with those who are not well known (such as the digitally represented
individuals in certain VR experiences). With these caveats in mind, Coplan concludes
by saying, “In my view, this process is the only one that can provide experiential
understanding of another person or understanding of another from the “inside”’ (58).
Considering the level of deliberate intentionality required to sustain an ethical, outwardfocused level of empathy, it is difficult to believe that a meaningful understanding of
another can truly occur after a five minute experience — regardless of how immersive it
may feel at the time.
POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
However, the idea that another’s experience can be meaningfully understood
after a brief, hyperreal VR experience, is at the heart of the claim that virtual reality is
the “ultimate empathy machine” (“Chris Milk,” 03:12-03:13). Indicative of the effort to
combat an increasing sense of technological alienation in contemporary society, the
production of “socially responsible” (Bollmer and Guinness 32) VR content has become
a trend in recent years, as evidenced by initiatives such as the Facebook / Oculus “VR
for Good” campaign. Similarly, Karim Ben Khelifa’s The Enemy (2014) brings users into
close proximity with digital representations of guerrilla combatants while Alejandro

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Innaritu’s Carne y Arena (2017) offers a multi-sensory simulation of a traumatic migrant
border crossing. These experiential documentaries and nonfiction experiments are
designed to stimulate empathetic responses to the VR subjects upon exposure to the
visceral “truth” of their circumstances. Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness comment
on this tendency in nonfictional VR projects to prescribe a kind of moral
intersubjectivity. They state:
VR has become firmly linked with an ideal of socially responsible forms of
sensation, one that literally remakes and ‘corrects’ brains and perception. It
relies on a politics of vision that suggests that seeing through the first-person
mechanisms afforded by VR permits one to understand and act in accordance
with an empathetic, cognitive knowledge that emerges from supposedly
knowing what it is like to be another through the simulation of
experience” (Bollmer and Guinness 32).
Classified as a corrective or “orthopaedic aesthetic” (Kester qtd in Bollmer and
Guinness 32), VR experiences such as these seem to “conceive of the viewer as an
inherently flawed subject whose perceptual apparatus requires correction” (Grant
Kester qtd in Bollmer and Guinness 32). These virtual reality experiences also seem to
bypass Coplan’s notion of lasting empathy, which should originate from within as a
deliberate intention and desire to understand, and not as an involuntary reaction to
visually immersive narratives.
Additionally, there is a noticeable lack of any significant interaction available to
participants while inside these experiences. This lack of participant agency — which
encompasses little more than the ability to look or walk around their surroundings —

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has been wryly referred to as the “Swayze-effect” (Burdette para 13), a reference to
Patrick Swayze’s invisible presence without agency in the film Ghost (1990). D’Aloia
illustrates the importance of interactive agency, especially within the process of human
cognition: “The meaning of an experience is not reducible to structures in the brain
alone but is instead the product of continual and reciprocal connections between the
body (of which the brain is a part) and the environment” (para 2). More than the
sensation of being within a virtual environment, real-time feedback is integral to the
cognitive process — and the creation of empathy. Sarah Jones and Steve Dawkins
touch on this when they write of the user experience inside Milk’s Clouds Over Sidra,
“While there is a sense of Sidra’s life spatially and temporally, the fact that there is little
actual interaction with her means that it is difficult to know what she is thinking and
feeling for the majority of the filmic experience, let alone understand the totality of her
existence” (Jones and Dawkins 304).
Similar to this absence of meaningful interaction, the underlying goal of virtually
approximating someone else’s experiences has been labeled an insidious form of
technological appropriation. As Bollmer and Guinness write, “Technological simulation
cannot be empathetic because, rather than allowing one to acknowledge the
experience of another, it merely absorbs another’s experience into one’s own,
assimilating another into one’s subjectivity as if simulation is equivalent to lived
experience” (Bollmer and Guinness 33). In other words, a condensed, digitally
mediated experience cannot authentically replicate the inner life of another — nor
should it. Bollmer goes on to write, “A story does not disclose the being of another to
oneself. Rather, it allows part of their experience to become aesthetically sensible (74).”

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Jake Bohrod further refines this thought when he writes of the refugee subjects in
another of Milk’s short documentaries, The Displaced (2015): “Their story is subsumed
by my story, my own consciousness, the story of virtual reality itself” (para 21).
Both of these statements reveal another layer of ethical complication associated
with the elicitation of empathy inside a virtual space — the confluence of empathy and
visual spectacle. The merging of visual sensation and “corrective” narratives reveals
itself to be especially problematic when considered alongside Debord’s statement
regarding the commodified spectacle’s “tendency to make one see the world by means
of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly)” (120).
Immersive VR projects subsume vision — humanity’s “most mystifiable sense” (Debord
120) — in an attempt to simulate another’s experiences with a visceral immediacy
traditional film is unable to replicate. As a result, many participants may exit these
ephemeral VR experiences believing they are now privy to another’s authentic
emotional life when, in reality, they have only absorbed a digitally-rendered
approximation. As situationist and social commentator, Larry Law, writes, “Once an
experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity, the
spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for
experience” (3).
CONCLUSION
Virtual reality projects, such as Facebook’s developing immersive social
platform, “Horizon,” seem to present a future of wide-spread virtual human connection
within our grasp. Coupled with bold proclamations, such as Milk’s, which classify VR
as the “ultimate empathy machine” (“Chris Milk,” 03:12-03:13) with the power to

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“change the world,” (“Chris Milk,” 09:43-09:45) the immense possibilities of virtual
realities has captured the imaginations of those who view the emerging technology as
a gateway to a better humanity.
However, in a world already bursting with commodified, digital interference
perhaps placing the weighty expectations of an improved humanity within yet another
layer of digital mediation should be re-evaluated. In Michael Madary and Thomas
Metzinger’s proposed VR ‘code of ethics,’ they write, “The potential for the global
control of experiential content introduces opportunities for new and especially powerful
forms of both mental and behavioural manipulation, especially when commercial,
political, religious, or governmental interests are behind the creation and maintenance
of the virtual worlds” (5). Debord echoes their warning when he writes, “The spectacle
is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not
only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is
its world” (120). Without pausing to consider the ramifications of introducing an
alternative method of emotional connection, rather than an “empathy machine,” virtual
reality may devolve into the most sophisticated, all-consuming and potentially
dangerous commodity-spectacle humanity has created to date.

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Works Cited
1. Bailenson, Jeremy. Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It
Can Do. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
2. Bohrod, Jake. “Through the Eyes of the Last Medium: the Witness and the New Virtual
Reality.” Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media , vol. 30, 6 July 2018.
3. Bollmer, Grant. “Empathy Machines.” Media International Australia, vol. 165, no. 1, 2017, pp.
63–76., doi:10.1177/1329878x17726794.
4. Bollmer, Grant and Katherine Guinness. “Empathy and Nausea: Virtual Reality and Jordan
Wolfson’s Real Violence.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 2020, pp. 28–46., doi:
10.1177/1470412920906261.
5. Burdette, Matt. “The Swayze Effect.” Oculus, 18 Nov. 2015, www.oculus.com/story-studio/
blog/the-swayze-effect/.
6. “Carne y Arena: Art and Technology.” Youtube, The Phillips Collection, 4 June, 2018, https://
youtu.be/-XcvJ6lUTwI
7. “Chris Milk: How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine.” Youtube,
uploaded by TED, 22 April, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXHil1TPxvA
8. Clouds over Sidra. Directed by Gabo Arora and Barry Pousman, Chris Milk. VRSE, 2015.
9. Coplan, Amy. “Will The Real Empathy Please Stand Up? A Case For A Narrow
Conceptualization.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 49, 2011, pp. 40–65., doi:
10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00056.x.
10. D’Aloia, Adriano. “Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Virtual Reality Immersion and
Emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena .” Senses of Cinema,
no. 87, June 2018.
11. Debord, Guy. “The Commodity as Spectacle.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks,
edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, Blackwell, 2006, pp.
117-121.
12. Hassan, Robert. “Digitality, Virtual Reality And The ‘Empathy Machine.’” Digital Journalism,
vol. 8, no. 2, 2 Jan. 2019, pp. 195–212., doi:10.1080/21670811.2018.1517604.
13. Iñárritu, Alejandro, director. Carne y Arena: Virtually present, Physically invisible. Fondazione
Prada, Legendary Entertainment, 2017.
14. Jones, Sarah, and Steve Dawkins. “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes: Creating Empathy in
the Practice of Immersive Film.” Media Practice and Education, vol. 19, no. 3, 2018, pp.
298–312., doi:10.1080/25741136.2018.1520538.
15. Khelifa, Karim Ben, director. The Enemy. Camera Lucida Productions, France Télévisions,
NFB, 2014.

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16. Law, Larry. “Spectacular Times: Images and Everyday Life (Pdf) : Larry Law : Free
Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, 2012., archive.org/details
SpectacularTimesImagespdf.
17. Madary, Michael, and Thomas K. Metzinger. “Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct.
Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology.”
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol. 3, 19 Feb. 2016, doi:10.3389/frobt.2016.00003.
18. “Notes on Blindness.” Amaury La Burthe, Arnaud Colinart, James Spinney, Peter
Middleton. Ex Nihilo, Arte France, Novelab, 2016.
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2014, www.technologyreview.com/2014/03/26/13732/what-zuckerberg-sees-in-oculusrift/.
20. Roşca, Mădălina. Seeing with Feeling: Filmed Revolutions of Others, from an Empathic
towards an Involved Spectatorship of Documentaries. Editura Propeller, 2016.
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Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life. Harper One, 2018.
22. Tankovska, H. “VR/AR Market Size 2020.” Statista, 8 Dec. 2020, www.statista.com/
statistics/591181/global-augmented-virtual-reality-market-size/.
23. The Displaced. Directed by Imraan Ismail, Chris Milk. VRSE, 2015.
24. “The Machine to Be Another.” BeAnotherLab. Institute of Art and Culture, Barcelona, 2012present.