What is “Facebook official” in virtual reality? Moving towards a social metaverse
In 2021, Mark Zukerberg made waves when he committed the future of what was Facebook to a new digital future — one fueled by AR & VR products and services. In a commitment to this vision, Facebook became Meta Platforms, where metaverse-first thinking would permeate product development. 2 years later, this announcement (and the mind-boggling financial investment that came with it) feels like a lifetime ago. Conversation online swirled about Zuckerberg and the metaverse, with tones ranging from relentless mocking to mindless praise to skeptical optimism.
My own skepticism of this new virtual world felt confirmed when Kotaku described Horizon Worlds as the “hollow, corporate shell” I would have expected from Facebook. But recently I’ve felt inclined to revisit my assumptions about the potential of the metaverse and VR as a whole.
A few weeks ago, I gave birth to my second child. In the delight of welcoming my newborn, I experienced a familiar itch to make this life event Instagram-official. I wanted the perfect photo in the cutest newborn hat with a witty caption announcing his name. This itch to put my life online got me thinking about why making things Facebook official or Instagram official have felt like near-tangible social pressures, and why I want to — and in many ways enjoy — turning my lived experience of life into digital content. And, in contrast, I have no desire to intertwine my life (lived or digital) with the virtual worlds prophesied by Meta.
Boundaries between the digital and material have eroded
Social media has single-handedly proven that any oppositions we may have perceived between the digital and the material are illusory. The impact of our digital conversations on social stability alone has been so mightily that people even experience bodily harm, like on the events of Jan 6. Social media, though highly curated and often hyperbolic, commands our attention and actively invites our participation.
We’ve become accustomed to physical spaces that act as little gateways into hashtag-driven digital spaces. Fifteen years ago, an Instagrammable space had to be made in the wild. A successor to the Kodak moment, these were interesting city alleyways, vistas in a National Park, poolside views at golden hour, or a duck-lipped selfie at a party fit into a square frame. Today an Instagrammable space is often designed for the photograph. From color palette, props, lighting, possible camera angles and compositions, interactivity, group shots or selfies, the aesthetics and features were chosen for the purpose of being shared on social media. That is, the space has been composed from and for the smartphone camera lens, not physical presence.
We find these places at tourist hotspots, city centers, within malls, at weddings or birthday parties, in cafes and record stores, and often create them within our own homes. We construct a set and perform. Many of these spaces were designed with a still image in a square frame in mind — a standard which has now been decidedly replaced by vertical video thanks to Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Stories and Reels.
While we have a welcome attitude towards these materialized doorways to the digital, most of us seem unequipped — or perhaps unwilling — to dwell there. The consensus seems to be that trading the material for the digital is laughable, though our words and our behaviors don’t always align. Take gamers. Any video game’s player base will loudly proclaim in community forums that in-game shops asking for real world money is terrible, yet these in-game shops are incredibly profitable. NFTs were born as a product in search of a problem, banking on a possible future where we as consumers see higher material value in virtual things. But this speculative, poorly defined market faces a normalization problem. We’re happy to (re)shape the physical world for digital access and performance, but digital worlds and digital objects don’t translate well back into material-physical use or value.
To know an app by its metaphor
Digital media are the unifying threads of our daily life. We visit restaurants which encourage us to use certain hashtags in our foodstagrams, take a break from the computer to check push notifications on our phone, and live-Tweet (live-X?) our way through the newest MCU installment on Disney+. Our self expression is used for free promotion and our attention has a price.
At a macro level, new media technologies are reshaping our sense of social memory, performance, preservation, curation, and exhibition. Gen Z and Millenials are often credited as the primary actors in this, but any digital native or digitally dependent person can probably relate. We move effectively, effortlessly, and continuously between social media platforms and other digital activities.
But that’s just the perspective of the consumer. What about the builders? How and why are these media forms made?
New metaphors of connection
In User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant described the burdens of using apps like social media as a result of a poor originating metaphor. The app store mirrored the shelves of a real, physical store. This metaphor in-turn shaped how we consume apps like Instagram or Uber or a calculator. We retrieve them as we do packaged, stand-alone goods; they run as isolated programs for use one at a time. An interconnected web of technologies is the opportunity of digital infrastructure, but such a creative OS is blocked by the metaphors the begot the app and digital economies. Resolving these friction points — opening and closing multiple apps, clicking and tapping about — will require a new metaphor. “When someone finds it,” Kuang and Fabricant say, “Our digital lives will evolve.”
Iconic social products are housed in the Meta Platforms umbrella: WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, even Threads. Is Meta not actively experimenting with possible futures of digital experience in their pursuit of the metaverse? Is Meta leading the way in the creation of a new metaphor? Zuckerberg undoubtedly thinks so. He said as much back in 2021:
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet, we’ll be able to feel present — like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.”
Despite efforts to expand into a virtual or hybrid reality that offers another kind of social experience, the metaverse has quickly become a meme. Statements like Zuckerberg’s have been seen as pretentious or foolish at best. Sure, we can ask if the metaverse has a chance at changing our relationship with digital life. But, perhaps uncomfortably, we could also ask: Shouldn’t someone be pursuing this in the first place?
Hollowing out a virtual world
Yes, the metaverse offers a dream. It’s a promise of a virtual world where I could attend meetings with my remote colleagues, see a Beyonce concert without finding a babysitter for my kids, or tour a rendering of Luxor. All this without leaving my home. But I want to go outside.
It’s no secret that one of the failures of Horizon Worlds — aside from not offering anything particularly new or exciting to gamers — is timing. After the pandemic, we’re finally returning to physical spaces with other people. Social distancing proved that digital connections don’t fill every void.
And yet…I’m starting to think that Zuckerberg’s bet on a metaverse seems to be a natural continuation of the story we’ve been writing with the digital. When social media entered our pockets, we shared our faces and shared the world we occupied. We all became photographers. Then, we started reshaping and re-designing our material spaces for the purpose of digital documentation, sharing, and social engagement. Why wouldn’t, then, a chapter in this story be about removing these negotiating moments and friction points? That is, could the entirety of a social experience be created in, for, and shared to a virtual space without feeling hollow?
Meta has a fascinating answer to this problem. The company has recently turned its attention to generative AI which could lead to a VR world populated by AI-powered chatty NPCs and design assets. But hype only takes a business so far, and Horizon Worlds is struggling to compete. Other games provide narrative, community, stakes, (and frankly better visuals) while Horizon Worlds lacks a reason for being. Meta has yet to offer anything fundamentally different or new. We’ve experienced Second Life, Sims, and MMOs — we expect advancement, not replication of digital experiences we had in 2005. Generative AI may fill gaps, but it isn’t going to fix the fundamental design problems that led Kotaku to describe Horizon Worlds as corporate and hollow.
But that doesn’t mean an appetite for an embodied virtual life isn’t in the cards.
Towards a social metaverse
Honestly, I’m not interested in the future of the metaverse or Horizon Worlds from a gaming perspective. I don’t think a VR headset and a few successful games is going to be the future-defining next chapter of the internet that Zukerberg aspires to, nor do I think it fits the bill as a new metaphor for our digital experience. What I’m waiting for is VR social media that can capture consumers in the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal, YouTube, TikTok, or MySpace.
This will be a difficult task. Social media is at its best when it inspires the user whilst capturing their attention; it creates a want/need for the user to do something shareable or create something expressive. Being seen (and ‘Liked’) matters. MySpace taught an entire generation the basics of HTML just because it facilitated an opportunity for the user to have a room of their own online. Animal Crossing’s popularity is owed not just to an audience that loves to collect, but an audience that loves to personalize. Player housing in MMORPGs encourages a casual player base that otherwise would be elsewhere. Pinterest boards mimic a teenage-like desire to collage a bedroom wall.
At its core, social media invites the creativity and curiosity of the user. In turn, it encourages the user to create and share content. TikTok is particularly effective at scaling this concept by encouraging users to be participants in trends and challenges. Product features like stitching facilitate this virality, from dances to cracking an egg on a toddler’s head.
If social media has an expectation that the creativity of the user will contribute to the creation of content, then the barrier to entry for VR and the metaverse is already clear. The vast majority of people aren’t going to learn the technical and artistic skills required to produce visual or graphic content. These technologies are not equivalent to learning basic HTML to change the background color of a webpage.
I hope that this is where Meta finds a way to employ generative AI. Once a social media platform that exists by and for the metaverse is conceptualized, users of that platform will need tools that allow them the same range of creative and personal expression available in physical reality. Without this, I don’t see “metaverse-official” taking its place next to “Instagrammable” and “Facebook official.”
