Recently, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, revealed that there is an upcoming shift in the company. This shift involves bringing together Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and other company subsidiaries and unifying them under the name Meta. According to Zuckerberg, “Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.” Meta describes this metaverse as a hybrid experience of different types of media with a new level of immersiveness.Virtual and augmented reality will play a large role, creating this new virtual world as well as projecting virtual elements into the real world. Meta claims that the Metaverse exclusively will allow people to communicate and interact from long distances in ways that were previously impossible.
Zuckerberg has made enormous claims about how the Metaverse will change the future of his company. He claims that it will be the next successor to mobile internet as a whole, will likely not see much profit within the near future, but instead will develop over time to become a network reaching over a billion people, and much more.
Looking back to the present, there were major repercussions for Zuckerberg’s changes to the company. Following an earnings report that discussed how the tricky transition from social media to a virtual world would be handled, Meta’s worth took a turn for the worse. The company’s stock went down 26 percent and its market value dropped $230 billion in a single day.
One reason that the Metaverse is being looked at with such skepticism is Facebook’s history of data collection. If a simple social media platform was able to collect and sell user information to advertisers, how much further could a virtual world take this practice? Sensors, headsets, and audio interfaces would be necessary to participate in the Metaverse, offering Meta an ample opportunity to expand their data collection on their users.