From all the things I learned from previous Wow and Wonder posts, I’m really interested in the incoming social media platform: the Metaverse and how will this virtual reality world influences our current life. This concept has its origin from the science fiction novel “Snow Crash” in 1992, and now the company Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, is aiming to realize this platform. Before the conference of Metaverse, we have used this concept in a lot of our films and novels, for example, the film “Ready Player One” came out in 2018, it is based on this virtual reality concept. Therefore I want to talk a bit more about my thoughts on the Metaverse.
At first, I was amazed by the concept and it feels we are like getting a second life in this virtual reality world, we can practically do everything on this platform and it can benefit us in a lot of aspects: it fits great with the current pandemic time, and it can help us to do anything we want as an avatar, it can also improve homeschooling/ work from home experience with no doubt. Another important aspect is that it can definitely increase the affordability of a wide range of experiences and products, since it’s all in a virtual world, people can spend a minimal amount of currency to buy services or products that are considered luxuries in the real world. To link with what I learned in the past few weeks, with Connectivism being a new trend of learning method, I believe Metaverse can satisfy all prerequisites for this learning theory. The Metaverse is for sure a diverse and potential platform because of its variability and creativity, it is actually a combination of all existing social media platforms.
There are two sides to everything, including the Metaverse. We still have a lot of challenges we need to improve on the existing social media platforms, and one of the most important is the privacy violation. I experience privacy violations all the time, when I talk to my friend about purchasing anything on any social media platform, I will receive advertisements about the specific products later that day, it struck me how fast our information is leaked on social media. This is a serious problem and needs to be fixed as soon as possible, this is the first challenge the Metaverse will face, In Jessie’s post, she experienced identity stolen and used. In the Metaverse, it will be harder to protect users’ privacy because it’s virtual reality, and I wonder how they manage to do that. In terms of learning on the Metaverse instead of learning offline, after reading the post from Jingjing, I agree that this method is not for everybody, some people learn better in the traditional way which is learning offline, we need to find the balance of these two methods if the Metaverse comes out.
Personally, I look forward to this new social media platform, it is unlike any existing platform right now, I wonder how it will change our way of life.
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