ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a civic media framework to work collaboratively on social issues within a community and its members. Unlike the exploitative way that professional VR creators use their human participants to evoke sympathy in order to fundraise and raise awareness of humanitarian causes, community members can use immersive media creation to genuinely generate social empathy to motivate action. To achieve this digital empathy, participatory design and participatory action research are applied to establish sustainable solutions to the community’s social issues. New immersive technologies allow any person with a mobile device to design, produce, and share their media. Nevertheless, a collective participatory effort for dismantling structures of power through new immersive technology can provide stronger and more sustainable solutions. This chapter advocates a process of collaborative research, design, production and distribution with shared responsibilities and control to promote social justice. Using media literacy competencies aligned with civic media principles, this chapter provides guidelines to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion through the creative process to achieve a design representative of its users.