The term metaverse was coined in 1992 by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash. Its most basic definition refers to the “concept of a fully immersive virtual world where people come together to socialize, play, and work.”
It represented a parallel virtual reality universe created from computer graphics, which users around the world can access and connect through glasses and headphones.
The metaverse concept recently made public by Facebook’s rebranding as Meta will revolutionize the way we interact with the world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that “the next generation of the internet is the metaverse” and existing social media will fall under this new wave.
He describes the metaverse as “a virtual environment where you can show up with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think of it as an embodied internet that you’re in, rather than just watching.
The major problem with the professional and academic Egyptian media treatment regarding the metaverse is flattening, either limiting its risks on health and physical issues or posing a danger at the level of security penetration.
Some Egyptian experts still talk about the metaverse as if it is some kind of fantasy and it will not easily reach our world due to weak technical infrastructure.
The truth is that Generation Z, according to the innovation diffusion theory, will accept it more because of their passion for online games and entertainment value and of course human curiosity to explore metaverse worlds.
Talking about the metaverse does not only include the technical and material capabilities and their limits, but the question goes beyond that because sooner or later the technology will soon be subject to the law of supply and demand and this technology will become cheaper and closer to citizens.
When this happens, the countries that consume this technology will turn into a valuable treasure trove of data and information exchange for the countries that manufacture the technology.
We face a number of challenges with immersive metaverse-based technologies. Both technologies are persuasive and can influence users’ cognition, emotions and behaviors
Moral issues include the unauthorized augmentation and manipulation of facts into biased opinions. Collecting and sharing data with other parties is the risk with the broadest privacy implications.
The extra data layer can appear as a potential cybersecurity threat. Volumetric capture and spatial doxing can lead to privacy breaches.
More importantly, metaverse actors may be tempted to compile users’ biometric psychographics based on the emotions of users’ data. These profiles could be used for unintended behavioral inferences that fuel algorithmic bias. High-fidelity AR or VR environments and violent depictions can trigger traumatic experiences.
Data ethics, AI algorithms and deep learning techniques can be used to create fake deep VR avatars and identity theft. Immersion with interaction in 3D virtual worlds in the metaverse leads to additional affordances of building identity, presence and co-presence.
Some of the main concerns in the fields of social cognitive research and neurology are identification with one’s avatar in the metaverse which can have a profound psychological impact on behavior and learning; experiences embodied as avatars in virtual reality spaces directly influence human behavior and transfer to the physical world.
Embodied digital identity and the ability to engage with the environment and virtual objects from multiple viewpoints, such as third-person perspective, creates the psychological sense of being in a space, experiencing presence.
Presence or telepresence is the perceptual illusion of non-mediation. The psychological illusion of non-mediation implies that users do not perceive the existence of a medium that intervenes in their communicative environment.
The adoption of passive profiling technology by metaverse developers using push technology to ensure their users are targeted with the appropriate psychographic profiles.
Passive profiling technology uses search words, emotion, interaction with VR headsets that users wear together to build the user’s psychographic profile.
Researchers who have worked on passive profiling technology have found that some people do not prefer to be less engaged with the media content fed to their VR headsets, but they do want to actively seek out content. So the researchers kind of changed their method, so they control what appears to users’ headsets.
A nation’s mood is the measure used by the people, and it shows how well countries can succeed or fail. A nation whose psychological mood is bad, its national security becomes unbalanced because the shaken citizen is easy to be led astray in any direction. When the general mood is desperate, national security in its general sense is disrupted.
A country can, for example, shape public opinion and measure it, but it cannot do so with public mood. There is another important and vital difference – and it may be more dangerous – which is that the public mood is not in governments’ interest to notice and see, but they measure its repercussions or implications without notice. .
The Metaverse is an intriguing passage from simply controlling what you see or reading specific content to causing you to behave in a certain way or influencing your emotions and feelings to being able to create and shape feelings that do not did not exist in the first place, and here comes the era of psychological wars and the management of self-conflict in the user.
Encouraging suicide, spreading a culture of indifference, polarization, and glorifying violent acts as a matter of fame and recognition are some of the concerns over the possible effects of the metaverse.
The plain truth about the metaverse is that there is a problem of complex psychological and mental effects that requires the greatest efforts of communication and media scientists, neuroscientists, brain scientists and security experts to develop a integral educational and media model to deal with the metaverse. , especially in young people and adolescents.
This requires real ongoing awareness campaigns (seminars, integrated marketing, mentoring, orientation, symposiums, etc.) targeting homes, schools and universities, otherwise we will find ourselves in volatility traps of general mood swings , psychological wars and their serious repercussions, which we will not notice until it is too late.
* Sara Fawzy is a lecturer at the Faculty of Mass Communication, Cairo University
#Reviews #Metavers #Mood #management #psychological #mapping #game #Egypt #Daily #News