Do you really know what a metaversion is?
You can automatically parrot a standard response. It is a virtual world where people can work, study, play and buy things. But what does that actually mean? Or look? And is it enough to convince you to adopt it?
These are the concerns that Apple CEO Tim Cook has about the widespread adoption of the meta version. While he may know something about radical technology, he is not convinced that the average person understands the concept of the metaverse enough to meaningfully incorporate it into their daily lives.
Metaversion is just too crazy and weird.
Think about what makes something credible to you.
It probably draws on things you already know with a touch of sensible novelty. In other words, our interest is piqued when our need for novelty is balanced by an aversion to risk. Anything too new or different and we feel threatened.
In psychology, they are called minimally counterintuitive concepts or MCI. The less counterintuitive something is, the less it violates our prior ideas about the world and the easier it is for us to connect with it.
Metaversion is not counterintuitive in the least. There's nothing intuitive about being physically strapped to a place with a headset, "becoming" a cartoon-like persona, and walking through a virtual world among others.
It shatters all preconceived notions we have about the meaning of social interaction.
Tim Cook suggests that augmented reality (AR) – a technology that combines real-world objects with computer-generated objects – is more psychologically acceptable. It strikes the right balance of weird and acceptable. Because it seamlessly integrates into our pre-existing objective world, it's counterintuitive to say the least—and more likely to go viral with the masses.
Are my friends here in the Metaverse?
Wherever we go, we seek community. Our human need to belong (our emotional need to be accepted by members of our peer group) means that our behavior is socially and emotionally motivated.
But metaversion requires a whole new way of connecting—being. Cold virtual avatars bypass the warmth that people seek in social interactions, and the information-laden physical facial expressions that signal one's intent and emotions in real life simply aren't there anymore.
This makes making friends in the metaverse more cognitively demanding. And when something is too much work, we tend to stop doing it.
Not to mention that given the metaverse's experiential ambiguity and conceptual vagueness, it's statistically unlikely that a community that would meaningfully satisfy the average person's need for belonging would hang around in the metaverse.
Who am I in the Metaverse?
We are the storytellers in our lives. Our narrative identity means that we integrate lived experiences into a consistent, predictable timeline of who we are and the meaning of our lives. This contributes to our self-concept and makes us happier and more confident people as a result.
But who are we in the metaverse?
Not only would we have to reconstruct who we are from scratch, but we also have no reference point for what matters in a metaverse identity. Concerns about social status drive our behavior in real life, but how does the influence translate to an avatar?
It doesn't end there. Since we would likely alternate between different services and vendors within the metaversion (each requiring a unique self-identifying avatar and prescribing unique rules of interaction), our identity reconstruction process would be endless.
We would fall victim to a peculiar cocktail of identity crisis and decision fatigue. And actually for what?
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well article
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