At the Edge of Metaverse

 

The other day when I was walking down the main street in my town, there was a fellow in the distance walking towards me. From a distance, he seemed to be wearing VR goggles but it was actually a large black mask. Then I thought, this is how the future will be in a fairly short time with the advent of the Metaverse--with people walking around talking to themselves with VR goggles on. And it will all be normalized within a short period of time, as social media quickly became normalized with the use of smartphones. Not even ten years ago when we saw someone walking around talking to themselves, we thought they were schizophrenic. But now everybody does it. "Friend" became a verb what seems a generation ago. 

The effect of cameras (then cinema, then celebrity) cannot be overemphasized. Cameras or screens of any kind probably have changed the structure of society in very fundamental ways, perhaps the structure of our brains. (See the recent article on cybersickness: https://neurosciencenews.com/cybersickness-management-18978/)

It's not surprising that we're continually wanting to imitate, or even gesticulate along with the things that we see on screens. The camera and the screen will continually evolve into the future as they are embedded in more objects, and will likely have their own negative side effects, compounding with the extant negative side effects of TV, the Net, and Social Media.

This is one of the reasons we want to revisit old technologies because perhaps the negative effects they once had have died out with the generations that experienced them, and they might not be around to say how bad they are. 

By the way, the Metaverse is really a revived Second Life, albeit with new interfaces. That's interesting as well: What didn't have legs before get a new pair with new technologies that didn't exist then. (Think da Vinci's helicopter). The rub is in the cultural and historical contexts in which new tech gets combined with the old. This is a bad time for it I think. The merging of social media with the Internet in 2007 was in a zeitgeist, now it's a dystopia.

But as a creative person, this could be a new framework. I'm particularly interested in immersive sound--another example of a really old technology with new extensions.