In the film «Ready Player One», people are connected to the Oasis, a virtual reality platform, where only your imagination is the limit. You can fight with King Kong, dance in the middle of the air, or talk to holograms of the deceased. When I watched in 2019 the movie, which moved me to tears, I thought that the Oasis is actually not implausible within some 40 years. With the advent of virtual reality, it is remarkable that the author Ernest Cline had such a vision as early as in 2011.
However, recently the concept of the “metaverse” is trending, due to the news that Facebook is focusing on its VR system Horizon Worlds even decides on October 28, 2021 to change its name “Facebook” to “Meta” in order to show the shift of concentration. Wow, I don’t see that the Oasis is happening almost right now and here. The direction of immersive technologies, however, made me more wary than excited. In fact, it appears to be a turning point in the tug of war on the conception of interpersonal boundaries.
Think about how much has changed in the past 50 years in an exponential acceleration. Meeting used to be the only way of communication. Mails existed thousands of years ago, and telegrams, just one hundred years ago. Then email and text messages came into view in the whirl of the internet revolution, and social media and video calls emerged in the last decade, thanks to the growth of internet speed.
Our mentality of interpersonal boundaries, consequently, experiences a drastic change. When people in the last generation would rather meet, young people go out less and treasure more private space. For example, if my mom has a problem with the post office, she goes to the office, but for me, I wish I could reply in emails. When she wants to contact an electronic repair shop, she simply makes a phone call, and I would book on the internet. To her, a phone call gets things done within a minute, but emails are a hassle. To me, it is more convenient to record the dialogue in messages, and I have difficulty memorizing what was said in a meeting.
To be sure, social media helped me make friends and disclose myself in a safe, sheltered space, in my messy study or on a shaded park bench. I can reply to online friends after taking my time when I am in the mood. Likewise, TVs and movie theaters are replaced by Youtube and Netflix, which isn’t confined to a specific time. Space is therefore expanded and time blurred, and we are liberated from the hectic city and soar beyond the realm of our senses.
Text bears our thoughts and values, voice unveils our emotions and manners, but the image, though consuming the most computational complexity, carries our appearance rather than essence. Among them, language is the pinnacle of our civilization. It can be seen as the prototype metaverse, a network consisting of past and future, possibility and contradiction, individuality and generality, which you dive in, hoping that your peculiarity might at all be understood by somebody in front of you or from the opposite time zone, who likes to listen to Gregorian chants in the rain or to bone the fish before eating, exactly as you do.
Instead, there seems to be a reverse trend nowadays, which claims the secret garden from us, but leaves us in a frantic traffic jam. Blogs disappeared, Facebook entered, and in turn came Instagram, and finally Tiktok, Clubhouse, and a resurging Youtube. So much, medium asks me to put an image, because people seldom finish a long wall of text now. Wordpress provides me with a weird option to turn my post into a podcast. Honestly I don’t get it. I miss the age of texts.
Socializing is already tough in social media. Initially you worry whether the reply that you aren’t going to the concert is mild enough, and whether your recent criticism on the the ruling party conforms to majority of your friends’. Then you worry whether the filter applied to your food is vivid enough, and whether the meme of Shiba Inu is out of fashion. What next? The metaverse will import the social anxiety from real life to virtual reality. In time, in a party you attend through your avatar, will recur the old fear that you are less attractive, less humorous, less erudite, less charismatic, and not knowing to grip a glass of bordeaux at the base. Impossible. Like you move a stew away from an ant colony to another table, only to find the next morning that it has attracted another colony.
You know what the word “person” means? Masks, the kind for dramatic actors in ancient Greece, or in modern times mails, messages, or the metaverse. The festival is about to begin, and torches are lit all over the arena. Don’t mind what is behind the mask, the birthmarks and the scars. Watch the show. “Give me a mask, and I will tell you the truth.”
❧ October 27, 2021