I recently contributed to two publications on the metaverse to explore, from different angles, the democratic and societal challenges raised by these immersive environments.
At a time when many are talking about Meta’s “Metaverse” flop, following the company’s announcement of a 30% budget cut in this area, it is still worth paying attention to these technological developments. First, because Meta’s flop is not the metaverse itself, but Horizon Worlds, which is just one possible incarnation of what the metaverse can be as an immersive environment. You only have to look at the company’s latest headsets to see that AI also serves the metaverse.
In this regard, I invite you to revisit the report « Governing the Metaverse and Tomorrow’s Internet » (Renaissance Numérique, 2023) which clearly explains that metaverses – in the plural – already exist and are multiplying. From video games to virtual reality environments, via collaborative spaces, billions of interactions take place every day in these immersive universes. If you are interested in these questions, I invite you to consult the collective work edited by Matthias Quent, published in open access by Nomos. And if you want a broader overview of the phenomenon, the article in Frontiers in Virtual Reality offers a useful multidisciplinary synthesis.
A multidisciplinary article to make sense of it
The first publication is an article co-written with around ten researchers from various disciplines, recently published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality: « A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Technology, Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications for Society of the Metaverse« .
The idea behind this article is quite simple: the metaverse is so deeply intertwined with questions from computer science, psychology, design, law, education and sociology that we tried to offer a comprehensive view of its main issues and challenges. This was a real challenge and a feat of coordination, successfully led by Mel Slater. The article is an accessible introduction that covers the technical foundations, the implications for society (health, education, work, quality of life), governance issues and, of course, democratic challenges.
A chapter on concrete democratic challenges
The second publication is a book chapter that I co-wrote with Jessica Galissaire and Henri Isaac, titled « Navigating Democratic Challenges in the Age of Metaverses« . This chapter appears in a broader volume edited by Matthias Quent: Democratic Culture in the Metaverse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Potentials and Perils.
Matthias Quent summed it up well in one of his posts: while the debate on democracy and digital transformation is currently dominated by artificial intelligence – and rightly so – immersive technologies and augmented reality continue to develop quietly in the background, already shaping our interactions and our societies.