Assignment 1-Digital Activism and

Democracy
By: Shahan Majid

Erp: 21890

Metaverse is the new, emerging technology having the potential to shape realities and the
political dynamics of the world. In this platform users can access to multiple entertainment
activities like gaming, connect to other people, and do much more fun activities and have a
combined experience of everything in three dimensions. This will also revolutionize the
experience of social media and office and classroom meetings; people will interact with each
other by virtual 3D avatars.

The mechanical technology that one can access the metaverse are VR (Virtual reality) and
AR (Augmented reality) devices. VR devices are designed to capture our entire attention and
incarcerating our sense of hearing, vision and even touch, we become fully immersed into
the virtual world. Smart glasses, which could potentially replace mobile phones in future, is
an extension to access the metaverse outdoors. The idea of augmented reality is the fusion of
the physical reality and the virtual reality. It works by generating holograms that we can
interact to remain in the metaverse. So even we take a rest from VR there is always the
smart glasses which keeps us connected. Disconnecting from the metaverse would seem
more impossible and unavoidable. We will leave our digital footprints in everything we do;
we would provide more and more data and allow the algorithms to ‘know us more than we
know ourselves’. This could also be used for a mass surveillance that we have never seen
before says digital right activists (Delcker, 2022).

When humans continuously interact with the metaverse, the metaverse becomes their new
perception of reality. As our mind is fully immersed in this reality, our capacity to reason
and our way to exercise reason changes. For example, buying a virtual space in the
metaverse can be a very rational choice but for the people of different era it is foolish. So
now it depends on the tech giants that how they design metaverse and what could be their
purpose behind that. The most powerful social media company ‘Meta’ has a vision to close
the distance gap and create a powerful global community (Meta Investor Relations, n.d.).
But the current state of Meta social media platforms tells a different story, it throws the user
to an ‘echo chamber’ to appeal its users and profit their businesses using algorithm and AI.
The echo chambers help in strengthening one’s prejudices which creates divisions in the
society. So far, the meta is not on a slightest way treading the path of their vision which is to
create a powerful public sphere.

We have already seen that social media addicts are very less social in their physical life, and
they have more chances to have social disorders and we could also see rise of more social
disorders in more severe forms. Because the social media has done a great job in
individualizing the people and splitting physical relationships because people spend more
time in it. Because the metaverse is more mesmerizing, it will attract and consume more of
time of its user. This will have a devastating effect on the physical public sphere which still
exists in some forms.

Habermas idea of public sphere is a space where public opinions are formed guided by the
reason (Habermas, Lennox, & Lennox, 1974). This public reason is an essential feature of
democracy. But on metaverse, we hardly see any democratic purpose is being f0llowed.
There is enough evidence that shows that the ‘Meta’ metaverse could create a more severe
form of echo chamber and further disintegrate the public sphere (Canales, 2021). Those
echo chamber would be more dangerous since they the metaverse has the ability to exert
extremist tendency in us. Such echo chambers are profitable to the tech companies since
they target contents and advertisements according to our digital activity. The algorithms are
designed to serve consumerism, not democratic values. In such scenario, public reason can
never be exercised, and it becomes impossible to generate public opinion.

Greater polarization and more intense division also mean more intense cyber bullying,
trolling, and harassment. People physically mostly avoid these behaviors because in that
situation we have the realization of empathy, in online world people mostly forget their
empathetic tendencies (Jaupi, 2022). The metaverse trolling would have new dynamics.
Since the troll victim can hear and see the virtual avatar’s live, words and gestures would
inflict more damage than the written characters (Jaupi, 2022). In its early form we have
already seen many cases of harassment and even of virtual rape (Delcker, 2022).
To maintain a good social structure, there would be a need to govern this space.
Governments would have no choice but to create more rigid controversial rules that we have
seen in the case of todays social media. But as these rules have little to no impact to curb
violence, hate speech, misinformation, and other malicious activities in digital space, there
is very less hope that such rule could be implemented in metaverse (Boyd, 2022). There
would be no other way to govern the metaverse other than invading the privacy of every
individual.

Metaverse has very little to do with the public sphere, it is a business model which aims for
maximizing profit by exploiting the public sphere and human connections. Although the
creators are very confident that they could create a safe space for everyone to interact but
for now it seems that it rather divides than unite because it is more profitable doing so.

References
Boyd, M. (2022). Regulating The Metaverse: Can We Govern The Ungovernable? Forbes.
Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinboyd/2022/05/16/regulating-the-
metaverse-can-we-govern-the-ungovernable/?sh=62fff6c41961

Canales, K. (2021, Nov 20). Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse could fracture the world as we know
it — letting people 'reality block' things they disagree with and making polarization even
worse. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-
meta-metaverse-splinter-reality-more-2021-11

Delcker, J. (2022). What will the internet of the future look like? DW. Retrieved from
https://www.dw.com/en/what-will-the-internet-of-the-future-look-like/a-63158651

Habermas, J., Lennox, S., & Lennox, F. (1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article
(1964). New German Critique, 3, 49-55. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/487737

Jaupi, J. (2022, may 13). NO ESCAPE Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse will become a toxic world
of trolling, Apple iPod creator warns. The Sun. Retrieved from
https://www.the-sun.com/tech/5335227/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-toxic-trolling-apple-
ipod/
Meta Investor Relations. (n.d.). Retrieved from Meta:
https://investor.fb.com/resources/default.aspx#:~:text=Meta%20Investor%20Relations
%3F-,What%20is%20Meta's%20mission%20statement%3F,support%20and%20make
%20a%20difference.