A report by the Hessischer Rundfunk examines the question of whether future visions such as “Wired World” and “Matrix” are already becoming reality.
Frankfurt am Main – The “7 Days” series of reports was created ten years ago on NDR in the “Die Box” editorial office, which is intended as a “development laboratory for documentary storytelling” and has brought various individual and series projects to life. The idea is as simple as it is convincing: a reporter accompanies one or more people in their activities for seven days. The reporters joined hippies, harvest workers, Santa Clauses, cowboys, were in Auschwitz, in the youth cancer ward, on the Way of St. James.
So classic reportage topics. The self-experience report belongs as a subset in this journalistic genre. The Austrian journalist Max Winter accepted prison in order to be able to write from the point of view of a tramp, Egon Erwin Kisch tried his hand at being a professional diver, Günter Wallraff as an industrial worker. The reporters seek out specific situations and report from their own experience. In such cases, first person, first-person narration is legitimate.
“7 Days … Virtual Reality”: The inflated value of the ego
For some time now, however, the subjective perspective has gained the upper hand, it is still applied to the most banal of topics and at the latest then it becomes a mistake when the actual object becomes a minor matter and only gives rise to nonchalant expressions of one’s state of mind. This development could have contributed to the fact that some sections of the population meanwhile assume that journalistic journalism has too high an opinion share and are skeptical about it.
As observers, the best reporters are interested only in what is happening around them, not in their own emotional states. A paragon of the fine art of mindful lounging, Gay Talese never appears himself in his masterpiece Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Tom Wolfe did it occasionally, primarily when relevant content could only be conveyed through the reporter’s individual perception.
The “Virtual Reality” contribution from the “7 Days…” series shows almost textbook-like where the weaknesses of subjective reporting lie. The journalist Constantin Röse is still unfamiliar with the handling of virtual reality, i.e. digitally simulated living environments, today usually called metaverses. He begins an accompanying text for the show with the words: “When people told me about the Metaverse, the first moment I thought of space and not of a world that plays somewhere between the real and virtual world.” The author accepts from the first moment himself more important than the topic he was supposed to report on.
“7 Days…Virtual Reality”: Miniature Golf and Real Estate Speculation
The film begins with putting on the necessary VR glasses, which give users visual and acoustic impressions and allow communication with other visitors to the artificial worlds. Roese dons an avatar, a digital double, and meets the character “Max”, who introduces him to the customs and geography of the Metaverse. Among other things, they actually go to feed virtual ducks. Elsewhere you hear insults, see copulating cacti, play mini golf. Roese’s comment: “Only crazy people are out and about here.”
Later, Röse meets the person behind the nom de guerre “Max”, whose real name is Niklas, in a real café. Röse recognizes that Niklas “doesn’t really resemble his avatar.” A completely nonsensical relativization. Either Niklas looks like the avatar or not. The fashionable Anglicism “not really” can be deleted without loss.
Niklas doesn’t provide a plausible explanation as to why Metaverse fans don’t go play real miniature golf or feed live ducks. “It’s cool and it’s like hanging out with friends (…)”, he says vaguely.
In the meantime, Röse visits an architect’s office that designs buildings for virtual spaces. Like real estate and other goods, they are actually traded there, for bitcoins. Röse hears it and is amazed, but doesn’t bother with the obvious question: who collects the purchase price? Who regulates the movement of goods? In general: Who provides the virtual worlds and with what intention? What happens to the simulated properties if the server fails?
The history of this technology is also not mentioned at all. After all, in 2003 there was already some hype about the digital “Second Life”.
“7 Days … Virtual Reality”: What really works remains open
Therein lies the problem of this type of reporting: it remains superficially limited to pure phenomenology. Röse patrols further stations, the VR offer of the Hamburg miniature wonderland, the state fire brigade school in Kassel, where digital simulations are used in training, the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences with the Virtual Reality course, where Professor Frank Gabler outlines the future: “It’s going crazy a lot, it has to be said, a lot more than might be perceived in public (…).”
Gabler puts on an electronic cap that can decipher brainwaves and uses it to generate digital sounds via a monitor. Apparently a harmless gimmick, but in the field of IT companies, completely different uses of this technology are in mind.
The broadcast
“7 Days … Virtual Reality”, Thursday, July 28, 2022, 9:45 p.m., HR television and in the ARD media library.
The team of the show could have researched in this direction. But Constantin Röse and his co-author Sebastian Krausse do not make such efforts. Röse reports impressions such as “cool” and “crass”, is “really impressed”, “really overwhelmed” and, according to his conclusion, after seven days “positively surprised”. A meager result for this program, which is more of an entertainment offering, but can hardly be assigned to the information category.
The original concept of this series becomes incidental to this. Whether Röse was on the road for exactly seven days or not is irrelevant. It is, a mistake in the beginning, not even possible to stay in the Metaverse for seven days and to implement this documentary in the film. In this respect, an unfortunate choice of topic. It would have been better edited in a different form and much more thoroughly. (Harold Keller)
