[Watch] Meta: Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook’s new name

Rebranding effort or "clear bid to dominate the metaverse"?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the social media giant will change the name of its holding company to Meta, in a rebrand that comes as the company faces a series of public relations crises.

Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook’s annual conference on Thursday, where he outlined his vision for the ‘metaverse’ – a digital world built over our own, comprising virtual reality headsets and augmented reality.

Watch the announcement in video here:

Source: The Guardian

Also read:

Facebook relaunches itself as ‘Meta’ in a clear bid to dominate the metaverse

Source: theconversation.com

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company will change its name to Meta, saying the move reflects the fact the company is now much broader than just the social media platform (which will still be called Facebook).

The rebrand follows several months of intensifying discourse by Zuckerberg and the company more broadly on the metaverse – the idea of integrating real and digital worlds ever more seamlessly, using technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

Zuckerberg said he hoped the metaverse will be a new ecosystem that will create millions of jobs for content creators.

But is this just a shallow PR exercise, with Zuckerberg trying to reset the Facebook brand after several scandal-ridden years, or is it a genuine bid to set the company on course for what he sees as the future of computing?

Facebook’s journey into the metaverse

What’s not in contention is that this is the culmination of seven years of corporate acquisitions, investments and research in the field.

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While much of its work remains behind closed doors, Facebook Reality Labs’ publicised projects include Project Aria, which seeks to create live 3D maps of public spaces, and the recently released Ray-Ban Stories – Facebook-integrated sunglasses with 5-megapixel cameras and voice control.

All these investments and projects are steps towards the infrastructure for Zuckerbeg’s vision of the metaverse. As he said earlier in the year:

I think it really makes sense for us to invest deeply to help shape what I think is going to be the next major computing platform.

Why does Facebook want to rule the metaverse?

The metaverse may eventually come to define how we work, learn and socialise. This means VR and AR would move beyond their current niche uses, and become everyday technologies on which we will all depend.

We can guess at Facebook’s vision for the metaverse by looking to its existing approach to social media. It has moulded our online lives into a gigantic revenue stream based on power, control and surveillance, fuelled by our data.

VR and AR headsets collect enormous amounts of data about the user and their environment. This is one of the key ethical issues around these emerging technologies, and presumably one of the chief attractions for Facebook in owning and developing them.

What makes this particularly concerning is that the way you move your body is so unique that VR data can be used to identify you, rather like a fingerprint. That means everything you do in VR could potentially be traced back to your individual identity. For Facebook – a digital advertising empire built on tracking our data – it’s a tantalising prospect.

Is the internet a blueprint for an open metaverse?

Appropriately enough, the metaverse under Facebook is likely to resemble the term’s literary origins, coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash to describe an exploitative, corporatised, hierarchical virtual space.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Tony Parisi, one of the early pioneers of VR, argues we already have a blueprint for a non-dystopian metaverse. He says we should look back to the original, pre-corporatised vision of the internet, which embodied “an open, collaborative and consensus-driven way to develop technologies and tools”.

Facebook’s rebrand, its dominance in the VR market, its seeming desire to hire every VR and AR developer in Europe, and its dozens of corporate acquisitions – all this sounds less like true collaboration and consensus, and more like an attempt to control the next frontier of computing.

We let Facebook rule the world of social media. We shouldn’t let it rule the metaverse.

Authors: Marcus Carter, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney;

Ben Egliston, Postdoctoral research fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology.