Metaverse

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“So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

The notion of the ‘metaverse’ was first mentioned in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. In the novel, it referred to a place to which people flee in order to escape a world dominated by corporations. Since then it has come to refer to a wide range of virtual experiences and grown to include aspects of the physical world: objects, actors, interfaces and networks that
construct and interact with virtual environments.

Already political in Stephenson’s usage, the concept has become more prominent and problematic with the announcement that Facebook and other gaming corporations intend to become a ‘metaverse company’, creating an online world where people wearing virtual reality headsets would not just view content but be inside it.

The socio-political concerns associated with the metaverse are similar to those for existing social media platforms but on a larger scale. They include, for example, profiteering from data collection, surveillance, regulation and representation of gender, race and ethnicity. Regulators are already struggling to catch up with the impact of the first wave of social media.

One definition of the metaverse is that it is, “the convergence of 1) virtually enhanced physical reality and 2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.” (Smart et al., 2007). Thus, Smart et al. suggest thinking of the metaverse not as virtual space but as the conjoining of our physical and virtual worlds.

References

Bryant, M. (2021) How Facebook is planning a new life for you in the ‘metaverse’ [Online title: Is Facebook leading us on a journey to the metaverse?]. The Observer, 26 September 2021, p.46. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/26/is-facebook-leading-us-on-a-journey-to-the-metaverse [Accessed 26 September 2021].

Smart, J. et al. (2007) Metaverse roadmap. Pathway to the 3D web. A cross-industry public foresight project. San Pedro, CA: Acceleration Studies Foundation. Available at: https://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Annotations/wiki/images/1/19/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf (Accessed: 26 September 2021).