The Cultural Hurdles Facing the Metaverse
At its basic, culture is the knowledge humans use to navigate their world. There are many different cultures and layers of culture in our world today. They’re always evolving. Underlying many are the traditions and practices we establish, sometimes religion plays an overarching role, sometimes it doesn’t. Technology has always played a part in shaping human cultures since we first picked up some rocks and started making tools to hunt, eat and build. As new technologies are introduced into a culture, it can have small or significant impacts.
Some technologies, like the internet, have profound impacts and they also force us to make significant changes. We had to change to adapt to the operating systems of the smartphone, not the other way around. So what about the metaverse?
Some proponents of the metaverse, like Zuckerberg, proclaim that we as humans will have unlimited and amazingly wonderful new ways of being creative, we will form deeper human connections too and it will be a huge leap forward. These are interesting views and are common with those developing new technologies where they feel much money can be made. But they’re more idealistic and than realistic. The metavers, or many mateverses, may well play a key role in human society, but it/they have some significant hurdles to overcome. Will society and its many cultures adapt to the idea of the metaverse? We can’t really know until it comes to be. And it may not.
Placemaking is one such hurdle. Placemaking plays a significant part in all human cultures. At a hyper-local level, this may be small urban parks with areas to play game, hold readings or have community picnics. Our homes are places as well. Starbucks famously wanted their coffee shops to be people’s “third place” apart from home and our place of work. The metaverse proponents talk of public concerts, poetry readings, art exhibitions and conferences that we can go to virtually. These could be very interesting ways to showcase various cultural elements such as music, where people can learn about each others culture. The hurdle to overcome however, is that in virtual spaces, only sight and sound are available as experiences. Smell, human to human contact (a key element in spacemaking activities) are missing. It will be difficult to have in-depth experiences in a sterile virtual world. They can only be so immersive.
Another hurdle is cultural sustainability. Digital communities will form in the metaverse as much as they do in online forums and digital communities like Facebook groups. But these types of digital communities are, as I’ve extensively researched, quite amorphous. The structures and affordances may stay in place, such as a Facebook group, but members come and go and extremely few have much activity beyond 18 months. Will a VR experience change this? Unlikely. They aren’t suitable to an AR experience with a smartphone or smart glasses. The bonds that tie cultural groups together are limited in their ability to reinforce connection and engagement in digital spaces.
Then there’s kinship, which plays an incredibly vital role in cultural groups and communities. It refers to the culturally defined relationships we form. In the family sense it is the direct family ties. In digital culture, it is the relationships, terminologies and rules used to keep everyone connected. The bonds we hold in the physical world for cultural kinships don’t transfer well into digital communities. They work better with diaspora and direct cultural groups, but not very well when you start mixing various cultures into an online community. The rules change often and the boundaries are only in effect when a person is actively in that space. We don’t live in digital spaces, we live in the real-world. Our pulls will always come from the real-world.
These are some of the cultural hurdles that face a metaverse. Today, of the many metaverses, they are driven by gaming and are gamified to keep people involved. This means they’re extremely limited in their capacity to form, strengthen and build strong cultural bonds beyond gaming. The reciprocity system is money driven. Which is yet another hurdle. All cultures have systems of reciprocity. For true cultures these systems are more than just6 money, they include exchange of favours and maybe gifts. One could peerhaps, gift an NFT poem or artwork, but the metaverses currently being proposed don’t consider these aspects. They should.
So it’s not to say that a metaverse isn’t possible. We certainly know that some are functioning today, but as they may be increasingly immersive, they only do so for entertainment purposes right now. Which means limited times of engagement and an appeal to a small segment of society overall. It will be interesting to see if any metaverses seek to build deeper cultural connections beyond just the business model of making money.
