Two weeks ago, I felt a childhood rush of excitement for cardboard. When the Google Cardboard viewer from the New York Times arrived on my doorstep, I tore open its blue plastic packaging, downloaded the NYT VR app on my phone, and set myself up for some quality virtual reality viewing time.
After playing around with the app for a couple of minutes, I packaged the viewer back up, put it on my bookshelf and went out to brunch. I hadn’t even made it through a 1:44 minute-long video before setting it aside and going about my regularly scheduled life. Despite a desire to engage with this new piece of technology, I refused to pause my life to learn about someone else’s. My selfishness trumped my curiosity. Call me a millennial.
I like to think there’s a deep-seated wisdom of the other at the core of my being. Having been connected since adolescence to a wealth of information on the World Wide Web, my perspective is inherently broader than my parents. Even if this were true, there’s still an all-consuming resistance to empathize with others. Selfies, vanity, and egoism run rampant. Could the NYT VR mobile app save us from ourselves? Is virtual reality the harbinger of The Empathy Era?
A part of me hopes it is. I want to believe in the promise of the New York Times virtual reality app to transport me to another place. I see potential in it to free me from myself. It’s a…
