What is the metaverse? High-tech plan for Facebookify the world

Source: Adobe / wacomka

Nick Kelly, Lecturer in Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology .
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the tech giant will be moving from a social media company to a “reverse business,” working on an “integrated internet” that brings the real and virtual world together more than ever. .

So, what is a “metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires talk about to make the headlines, like Tesla boss Elon Musk, who makes “pizza places” on Mars. However, given that nearly three billion people use Facebook each month, Zuckerberg’s suggestion to change the address deserves some attention.

The term “metaverse” isn’t new, but recently there has been an increase in popularity and speculation about what all of this might mean in practice.

The idea of ​​the metaverse is useful and will likely be with us for a while. It is a concept that deserves to be understood even if, like me, you are critical of the future proposed by its supporters.

Humans have developed many technologies to trick our senses, from speakers and televisions to interactive video games and virtual reality, and in the future we may develop tools to trick our other senses, such as touch. and smell. We have a lot of words for these technologies, but there is not yet a common word that refers to the complete mixture of old reality (the physical world) and our artificial extensions of reality (the virtual world).

Words like “internet” and “cyberspace” have been associated with the places we reach through screens. They don’t quite capture the internet’s constant entanglement with virtual realities (like 3D game worlds or virtual cities) and augmented reality (like navigation overlays or Pokémon GO).

Equally important, the old names do not express the new social relationships, sensory experiences and economic behaviors that appear alongside these extensions of the virtual. For example, Upland combines a virtual reflection of our world with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and real estate markets.

Upland is a kind of ‘metaverse’ property trading game based on real world trends. tray

The Facebook ad talks about its attempts to imagine what social media might look like in the Metaverse.

It is also useful that the term “metaverse” is a poetic term. Researchers have been writing about a similar idea under the name “Extended Reality” for years, but it’s a pretty boring name.

“Metaverse,” written by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has a more romantic appeal. Writers are used to recognizing trends they should call: “cyberspace” comes from William Gibson’s 1982 book; “The Robot” is based on a 1920 play by Karel Schapke.

Read more: Do we want augmented reality or morphed reality?

New modern words like “cloud” or “internet of things” have stuck with us precisely because they are useful means of referring to technologies that are becoming more and more important. The metaverse falls into this same category.

If you spend a lot of time reading about big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, you might end up thinking that technological advancements (like the rise of the Metaverse) are inevitable. It’s hard not to start thinking about how these new technologies are shaping our society, our politics and our culture, and how we might fit into this future.

This idea is called “technological determinism”: the feeling that technological progress shapes our social relations, our relations of power and culture, with us as mere passengers. It ignores the fact that in a democratic society we have a say in how it all goes.

For Facebook and other big companies, determined to embrace the ‘next big thing’ before its competitors, the metaverse is exciting because it offers an opportunity for new markets, new types of social media, new devices and big electronics. public and new patents.

What is less clear is why you or I are excited about it all.

family affair

In the ordinary world, most of us are faced with things like a pandemic, a climate emergency, and a human-caused mass extinction of species. We have a hard time understanding what the good life looks like with the technology we have already embraced (mobile devices, social media, and global connectivity are associated with many side effects such as anxiety and stress).

So why are you so excited that tech companies are investing billions of dollars in new ways to distract us from the everyday world that gives us air to breathe, food to eat, and water to drink? ?

Metaverse-style ideas can help us organize our communities more productively. Common standards and protocols connecting disparate virtual worlds and augmented reality in a single open metaverse can help people work together and reduce duplication of effort.

In South Korea, for example, a “reverse alliance” is working to persuade business and government to work together to develop a national open platform for virtual reality. A big part of this is finding ways to combine smartphones, 5G, augmented reality, virtual currencies and social media to solve society’s problems (and, more pessimistically, profit).

Similar claims have been made about sharing and collaborating in the early days of the internet. But over time, the original promise was dropped due to the dominance of big platforms and surveillance capitalism.

The internet has been very successful in connecting people all over the world to each other and has served as a kind of modern Alexandria library to house vast stores of knowledge. However, it also increased the privatization of public spaces, advocated propaganda in all aspects of our lives, united us with a handful of giant corporations more powerful than many countries, and led the virtual world to consume the world. materially environmental damage.

Beyond the world of the world

The deepest issues with the Metaverse have to do with what kind of worldview it might represent.

From the perspective of the world, we can see ourselves as passengers in a unique reality which is like the container of our lives. This view is probably familiar to most readers, and it also describes what you see on something like Facebook: a “platform” that exists independently of one of its users.

In another worldview, which sociologists say is common in indigenous cultures, each of us creates the reality we live in through what we do. Practices such as work and rituals connect people, land, life and spirituality, and together they create reality.

The main problem with the first vision is that it leads to “one world”: a reality that does not allow other realities. This is what can already be seen on existing platforms.

The current version of Facebook may increase your ability to connect with other people and communities. But at the same time, it limits how you relate to it: Features like six preset “reactions” to posts and content chosen by invisible algorithms make up the whole experience. Likewise, a game like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (with over 100 million active users) offers unlimited possibilities for developing a game, but sets the rules by which you can play.

The idea of ​​the metaverse, by moving more of our lives to a global platform, expands this problem to a deeper level. It offers us an unlimited possibility of overcoming the limitations of the physical world; However, in doing so, you only bypass them with the restrictions imposed by what the Metaverse allows.

This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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