Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash
“What is real? How do you define real?”
You definitely remember Morpheus phrase when talking about reality. It has since then become a popular quote. Well, I don`t want to talk about The Matrix here. I want to talk about the things that you are already familiar with in every day of your life for the past few decades (at least). Mark Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse and nor did Neal Stephenson in 1992 in his novel Snow Crash. You stepped into an early version of the Metaverse from the very moment you picked your headphones and started playing music and from the very moment you turned on your TV or laptop or whatever, and started playing your favorite movie or your favorite game. The early seeds of the Metaverse were planted more than a hundred of years ago when Marconi invented the radio.
You might say yes, but the internet and the Metaverse are a whole different level. I agree. But it just did`nt happen overnight. It takes a certain amount of scientific, technological and social progress that need to converge to a point where we start the recognize the patterns of something new. Some people will reject it while others will dive deep into, but the truth is that everyone took part in its creation, in one way or another
Me, myself and the networked society
The fact is that we dive into the Metaverse everytime we connect and interact in a common symbolic space, either through a phone talk, an sms, a group chat or a forum discussion on Reddit or Discord. It doesn`t even need to be a visual space. The graphical, audible or haptic representations just expand the richness of immersion and the more immersive the experience is, the more you are willing to participate and interact in. Everytime we interact in a common symbolic space we are not just exchanging information. We exchange parts and bits of ourselves in a way that shape and change each other and the very space we interact in. We become the product of our experience as much as the experience is the product of our actions.
Are you afraid that you are going to lose yourself in this amalgam of informations and interactions ? That you are going to totally blend with the Metaverse just like a drop of ink into the ocean or be assimilated by a Collective mind just like the Borg from the Star Trek movie? That you are going to lose contact with reality?
Well I think that what might happen is exactly the opposite!
Did you lose yourself when you first started to listen to your favorite artist and joined a local fanclub? Did you blend with the TV show you that you watch on Netflix and talk about with your friends, or with the Reddit or Facebook group where you share pictures of your cat or discuss your personal political views? Did you stop recognizing who you are or did you actually discovered more about you and the world around you?
We are the product of reality and reality is a product of ourselves.
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