Lonely but not alone. Metaverses — pitfalls and opportunities. (Part 1 of 2)
We’re getting closer and closer to being plugged in.
Metaverses. A virtual world, where you’re connected to a network of users with your headset. Perhaps you and your friend from thousands of miles away will be able to interact in this constructed world, full with full-body representations of your “avatars.” A constructed coffee-shop space to meet up with your book club, or a private room to connect with your family from another state/country.
How does this make you feel?
There’s understandable excitement and anxiety with the human-metaverse (HMV) interactions, and that’s good — we’re still years away from this being widely adopted, so we can be part of the solutions -> assessing risks, finding opportunities, and helping people utilize these amazing worlds responsibly.
But you wanna know something? Many of us are interacting in early forms of metaverses right now. Heads glued to screens. Each individual out at the sea of information, exchanging words, transferring ideas through the medium of the device. Eyes consuming content, processing, connecting, reacting.
It is beautiful. It is ugly.
What will evolve over time is how tightly we’re integrated (conscious separation of reality), which constructed spaces we choose to spend time in, and how much time we’re spending in these spaces.
In this article, I’m going to detail three potential pitfalls that HMV interactions may emphasize. In the next article, we’ll look at the brighter side, three amazing metaverse innovations.
I think challenges with HMV will be extensions of existing problematic uses of internet and social media that exist today. Here’s a few:
1. Obsession with the personal brand over actual impact
I quite like when people share news and information related to causes I hadn’t known about before. Internet privacy challenges, prison-industrial complex, AI ethics — all causes I’m more informed about and care about as a result of people sharing this with me on twitter and other mediums. Social media is great at getting more visibility on a cause or challenge.
The problem is when individuals start using these topics as a tool to increase their own perceived self-worth. It’s potentially contagious and addicting. It starts with a retweet of an article with a clickbait title that you didn’t really read. It’s not long before you’re neck deep in dimension reduction and you’ve lost sight of being part of the solution for the cause you claimed to care about … instead caring primarily about your personal brand.
Imagine this in a metaverse — where your brand is virtual and it feels like more virtual eyes are on you than ever before. How important does a metaverse brand become? Are the retweets and mindless shares the real social currency? Do people start caring more about the groupthink buzzwords of it all over the uniqueness of perspectives?
Also … Depending on how much time you’re spending in the metaverse, how do you ensure that you’re a human being actually plugged into solving real-world problems rather than a meta-consumer/amplifier?
2. Echo chambers
Less diversity of perspective in a given space
Connected with the first one, but somehow easier to conceptualize. If you create a feed in social media with your interests, values, and political views, you’re bound to get more people that share and post about those same views. That’s great for building connections with strangers with shared interests … but it’s terrible for creating diversity of thought on important issues. And the more you hear the opinions of people who think similarly to yourself, the less tolerant you can become of differing perspectives. It’s a feedback loop. Now imagine pockets of these “echo chambers,” each with their own beliefs that they’re the ones that are right, without a shared discussion with alternative perspectives. How might they treat one another? With fear? With anger and intolerance? A feeling of us vs them? This is how polarization can become dangerous.
We have to think about what voices aren’t present? Who’s not being heard? From an infrastructure and inclusivity perspective, the technology involved with plugging into these metaverses isn’t likely to be cheap — and it’ll be easy for communities around the world to be left out of the platform. The digital divide continues to persist as a challenge for Native Americans, under-resourced communities, and rural areas throughout America alone. The longer this gap is open, the harder it is for these communities.
3. Metalife balance
But look, we can get past 1 and 2 if we actually have more diverse avenues of connection. But this is really what concerns me.
Empirically (with the behavior of employees during the pandemic shift to remote working environments), people were spending more hours working in their remote home offices.
Think about it, this is time you’re spending away from physical contact, with minimal variation in setting, throughout the workday. Time can become weird — the days become a blur, lines on the faces of the people you care about getting clearer.
That’s hard to deal with. On a personal note, something that was difficult for me, an introvert (working remotely during the pandemic), to reconcile was that I felt like I was being social as I was present on work calls and hearing people’s voices. But it wasn’t the same. The faces, the physical presence of others is energizing, it’s different (in all the unexplainable unconscious ways).
Now imagine being plugged into a metaverse of work. On the one hand, a simulated constructed world may feel less isolating than the office, but unconsciously, wouldn’t we know the difference? Whether it’s the uncanny valley of the avatars, or the simulated sheen of the environment — our mind has to put in work to fill in the gaps. Not only is that exhausting, but I don’t know what the impact of that would look like from a mental health standpoint.
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Look, I think the fact that we’ve had so much scifi literature (Snow Crash) and films (The Matrix) that have had cultural significance and driven discussion as potentially steering us away from a worse-case scenario event when it comes to metaverses. It drives discussion and thought — and that, coupled with time, enables us to ability to place rules around what’s healthy for us with these constructed worlds. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s fun to theorize what the future might hold!
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I think beautiful amazing value with metaverses, however, is going to come from augmenting the existing hubs of meaningful connections that exist today. I’ll go into depth in Part 2, but here’s a sneak peak on what’s to come.
- Therapy and trauma resolution. 2. Relationships.
Let me know what you think,
Sid.
