Goodbye Facebook, Hello Meta - What Facebook’s Rebranding Means for the Future of Tech
Social media superpower Facebook is creating a whole new universe for the world - the metaverse. Since CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement in late October, Facebook has changed its name to Meta Platforms, citing that its main goal is “to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.”
The question is, what does this actually mean? What is the metaverse going to change?
The metaverse is essentially an immersive, virtual world. Currently, there already exist gaming systems, including Roblox, that have created online towns and cities in which players can create avatars of themselves to interact with others. Other games, like Fortnite, allows players to communicate with others and play in games together as a new form of a social experience. The metaverse’s aim is to expand these virtual platforms to create an entirely virtual world that parallels our own, and this virtual society can be accessed by computers or by the rising technology of VR and AR headsets.
The Metaverse in Advertising
It seems that the Metaverse is already starting to become up and running, gaining the contributions of Nike into this virtual realm. Nike has already partnered with Roblox to create Nikeland, a virtual world that will become a center for Nike-sponsored sports and advertisements within the Roblox virtual world.
Nike is working to incorporate games, including tag and dodgeball, along with virtual emulations of big sporting events like the soccer World Cup. On top of this, Nike wants to bring in virtual avatars of famous athletes and Nike products into the online world in order to contribute to advertising within the platform.
In general, the Metaverse will be formed to become a host for a wide range of advertisements, allowing companies to not only roll out new products virtually before releasing them in the physical world, but also giving these companies a new way of putting their products out there for younger generations to gain interest in and eventually buy into.
Pros and Cons of the Metaverse
The Metaverse is definitely a long-term project, so we may not see a fully functioning, large-scale platform for another couple of years. However, we can start to think of both the benefits and detriments of such a huge platform.
On the plus side, the Metaverse opens the doors for new opportunities for games, social platforms, and access to more companies’ products and advertising. As a new form of social media, it could connect more people on a global perspective and create a new realm of entertainment as TV interaction and viewership dwindles.
At the same time, it is possible that the younger generations of society, who the Metaverse includes in its target audience, could be negatively affected by the eventual overwhelming popularity of the platform. Technology and social media have been cited to be bad influences, especially on younger kids, who are more vulnerable to advertising and the influences of social media.
As time goes on, we’ll be sure to see how the Metaverse becomes even more influential in our evolving society. Thank you for reading and see you in the next article!
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