Hot Features
Premium
Register for Free to get streaming real-time quotes, interactive charts, live options flow, and more.
Cyberspace alongside the physical world is called the metaverse — collective online augmented reality. In layman’s terms, it is a location where people can engage under several personalities. Neal Stephenson introduced the idea in 1992, making it a relatively recent concept. He introduced the idea of the Metaverse in his science fiction book Snow Crash.
Many video games include the idea of the metaverse in their narratives, allowing players to interact with one another. Facebook and other social media platforms are constantly investigating the idea of the metaverse and how they may use it to benefit both themselves and online users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the name change at the company’s Connect conference in October 2021. The parent company of Facebook is now known as Meta Platforms Inc., or “Meta” — a moniker based on its vision for the metaverse. Facebook will revive the metaverse under a new name, enabling connections, community discovery, and corporate expansion. Additionally, the firm declared that starting on December 1, 2021, its stock symbol would change from Facebook ($FB) to Meta ($MVRS). Since then, Facebook has been contributing to the development of the metaverse.
How is Facebook Doing This?
Zuckerberg is eager to begin developing the metaverse — a multi-year project. He predicts that Facebook will evolve into a medium that offers consumers a maximalist and connected experience. Zuckerberg wants to combine many ideas into a larger concept that will appeal to various audiences. According to Zuckerberg, the metaverse is an embodied internet that will function independently and decentralised and is not owned by any firm.
Facebook has rebranded as Meta to take baby moves towards the Metaverse. Zuckerberg has great expectations for the virtual world and claims it would create numerous job opportunities. In addition to Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, it owns Oculus, a virtual reality business. The company’s long-term objective is to shed its reputation as only a social networking corporation.
With this significant adjustment, Zuckerberg hopes to achieve just that. Facebook is also taking this move very seriously. To develop a “responsible” MetaVerse, the firm has already committed $50 million in investments.
Why Facebook Wants to Move Toward the Metaverse
Zuckerberg described the metaverse as a neat, well-lit virtual world where users could play virtual games, attend virtual concerts, shop for virtual goods, collect virtual art, hang out with other users’ virtual avatars, and attend virtual business meetings. Later, more sophisticated body sensors would be used to enter the metaverse.
Younger users are shunning Facebook’s programs in favour of TikTok, Snapchat, and other trendier apps as Facebook’s core social media operation ages. Suppose it persuades the younger generation to don their Oculus headsets and hang around in Horizon — Facebook’s social VR program — rather than watching TikTok videos on their phones. In that case, the metaverse might ease the firm’s demographic crisis.
Implications of the Metaverse
With Facebook’s plans to develop hardware and other technologies for the so-called metaverse, there will be an increase in the number of sensors in people’s houses, resulting in massive data collection. Ultimately, you’re putting your trust in Facebook to protect your data.
Trust is crucial as many people move to delete their Facebook profiles or, at the very least, use the social network less. Because of this, more and more individuals are switching to Apple products and utilising its impressive privacy features.
Recent claims that the social network prioritises revenues over the needs of its users revolve around Facebook’s AI system, which has an impact on direct users.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has issued a fresh warning about Meta and the metaverse. In an interview with the Associated Press, Haugen claimed that virtual reality might give Facebook another online monopoly, become addictive to users, and collect even more user data.
The amount of data utilised should be kept to a minimum — technology should be developed to enable privacy-protective data uses — and users should have transparency and control over their data, according to Meta.
Web3 experts at Bitcoineer Official mention that it is a complicated and worrying issue to tackle. Still, thankfully, the metaverse will only be created after a while — to resemble the concept outlined by Meta and others, it will take 10 to 15 years to become fully functional and established. But in the interim, individuals must recognise Meta for what it is: a new moniker for Facebook, which, as we all know, has a dubious privacy policy.
If the full metaverse integration succeeds, Facebook will usher in a new period of dominance, extending its influence to new spheres of culture, communication, and trade. And if it fails, it will be regarded as a futile, expensive attempt to give an almost antiquated social network a future makeover while diverting attention from critical societal issues. Either scenario is essential to consider. None of these issues will be resolved after creating the metaverse. It’s unlikely to resolve them at all, and it might even open Facebook up to new types of scrutiny that it would not have had to deal with if it had simply spent the next several years putting all of its attention into fixing the problems with its current products.
Byline: Hannah Parker
Photo by Tobias Dziuba on Pexels.
