Friends today, strangers tomorrow? Assessing the long-term effects of «prosocial» VR products

What we witness today is a widespread and sometimes uncritical tendency to read VR as an "empathy machine", an infallible prosocial tool that – importantly – has started being monetized. Most authors stress the medium’s ability to strike the users in the very moment of the VR experience. However, if what is at stake is social and political change, what is most crucial is rather the medium’s capacity to affect the users in the long term. On this grounding, my presentation first states that VR should be proved to promote not simply empathy, but long-term empathy. Based on this idea, the presentation touches the following points: 1. Defending this idea by deconstructing the usefulness of what I will call «flash-empathy» 2. Presenting and discussing existing evidence about VR and longer-term empathy 3. Drawing some conclusions as to how to further study this issue