Suchergebnisse

What impact does Virtual Reality (VR) have on political decision-making? By means of a 2 (format: VR vs. text) x 2 (argumentation: pro vs. con) between-subject factorial experiment, we assessed participants' voting outcomes on a fictitious initiative. Participants (N=175) first cast their vote with the traditional Swiss voting booklet. Next, participants were randomly assigned to either a VR or text stimulus (Swiss voting booklet) containing the same pro- or con-arguments. Finally, they could adjust their previously cast vote, if they wished. The presentation mode has an effect on participants' voting outcomes. For both, the pro and con VR scenarios, participants show an increase of YES votes, in favor of the presented initiative. These findings are reflected in the retrospective think aloud interviews conducted after the experiment. With this research, we hope to further shed light on how VR could be leveraged for the benefit of society in the political decisionmaking domain.

"This textbook offers an interdisciplinary, comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of the media linguistics approaches to explain and understand digital communication and multimodality. Linking the fields of communication studies, applied linguistics and journalism, it grounds communication practices in a deep understanding of the social and societal implications of language use in digital media. The tools to analyse multimodal texts are analysed in light of the advantages and constraints that different communication modes pose, both individually and in combination. Aimed at upper level undergraduates and graduates in applied linguistics, communication and media studies, including journalism and PR, this textbook contains case studies and professional examples highlighting the interplay between language use and digital communication and encouraging the reader to reflect on the themes covered, and put the acquired knowledge into practice. Online resources for students include videos, writing techniques, a guide to multimodal texts analysis, additional case studies and a glossary"--

One of the strengths of virtual reality (VR) is to provide a highly realistic user experience. How would VR's power of realism affect political decision-making, for example, when experienced by citizens before they cast their vote on an issue? We set out to empirically assess if and how voting information presented in VR would influence people's voting behavior, compared to the traditional text presentation format. In a 2 (format: text vs. VR) × 2 (argumentation: pro vs. con) between-subject factorial experiment, we assessed participants' voting behavior on a fictitious popular initiative. We first asked all participants (N = 179) to cast their vote based on a brief text, inspired by the traditional Swiss voting booklet (baseline). We then randomly assigned participants to one of four experimental conditions containing the same pro or con arguments concerning the voting issue. Participants could then adjust their previously-cast vote. This was followed by retrospective interviews (N = 32) to gain deeper insights into the decision-making process of the participants. Our study shows that the presentation format has a reinforcing effect, that is, leading to more YES votes for the VR group, and fewer YES votes for the text group. Irrespective of the pro or con arguments, participants show an overall increase in YES votes in VR, which is not the case for the text group. We identified six factors that may have led to this positive change with VR: (1) the affirmative power of images, (2) the vividness of immersive images, (3) first-person storytelling and storyliving, (4) the greater affordances of VR for engagement through interaction, (5) the design of the VR environment, and (6) the novelty of the VR technology.