Hu Yong: The virtual world allows us to be present all the time, but we are always absent

Hu Yong is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University

"Offline" is a kind of "natural" presence, and from "offline" to "online", based on the pursuit of efficiency or due to technical limitations, the origin of social activities is abstracted, omitting many details. Moving from "online" to "present" is a process of rediscovering the valuable details we discarded before, and ultimately achieving the exact same effect online and offline. The reason why the technology represented by the metaverse is emerging at the moment is because it is in line with the trend from "online" to "present".

There is no doubt that the sense of presence constitutes the outstanding characteristic of the metacosm. But to what extent it can achieve a consistent online and offline experience, we don't know. The more ponderable question is whether "online" and "present" are really a goal worth pursuing.

Presence is the defining quality of the metacosm

Venture capitalist Matthew Ball defines the metacosmum this way: "The metacosm is a vast network of continuous, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identities, objects, histories, payments, and rights, and enable an effective and unlimited user synchronization experience, with each with a personal presence." ”

Essentially, virtual reality technology that allows us to experience the metaverse immerses users in a lifelike digital world. What you see fills your entire field of vision, and your every movement is tracked. Ideally, this experience evokes what we call "presence." This brings with it an exhilarating, yet elusive nature: a transcendent, long-distance stimulus, in which you feel immersed in another world, regardless of whether you are actually just standing or sitting in place, as if you could escape from the worldly affairs of the moment at once.

Unlike today's Internet, the metacosm tries to give the illusion of being there. Mark Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as an embodied internet, and the core issue it brings to social media is how to achieve human presence without space. How to replicate the realism of face-to-face communication is a goal that social media has always dreamed of, and this realism depends on how much it transmits the user into the environment and the transparency of the boundary between the user's physical behavior and his avatar.

Of course, in terms of personal interaction, presence means the feeling of actually existing with a virtual other person in a virtual space. For example, in the future, it will no longer be just about communicating through a screen, but "you will be able to sit on my couch as a hologram, or I will be able to sit on your couch as a hologram... In a more natural way, we feel more with people" (Zuckerberg). This sense of immersion can improve the quality of online interactions.

Fundamentally, the metacosm is actually reconfiguring our assumptions about sensory input, spatial definitions, and information acquisition points. This brings about a sensory leap that introduces us from physical points of interest, latitude and longitude, boundaries, and adaptations to navigation into more complex concepts, such as those "places," actions, and beings identified unconsciously.

The coming metaverse is enabled by a combination of software and hardware, the most critical of which is our belief in the shared illusion as space. Compared to web pages and apps, the metacosm is more closely integrated with stereoscopic perception, balance, and direction. Currently we interact with the metaverse through computers and phones, but this interaction is rudimentary and crude compared to the immersion of VR and the digital persistence achieved in the real world through AR; but conversely, today's virtual reality technology is also unsatisfactory, bulky helmets can only provide isolated experiences, and players rarely have the opportunity to cross-play with others who have devices. It is expected that the metaverse, as a vast public cyberspace, will be able to combine augmented and virtual reality, allowing avatars to seamlessly jump from one activity to another.

Zuckerberg once told investors: "The decisive quality of the metacosm is the sense of presence, that is, the feeling that you are really with another person or in another place." Creation, incarnation, and digital objects will be at the heart of how we express ourselves, which will lead to entirely new experiences and economic opportunities. ”

If the metaverse is regarded as a continuous comprehensive economic system, there will be countless avatars and digital assets to interact with individuals and economies in the real world, when real individuals and corporate institutions have their own operating space in the metaverse and participate in activities at any time, digital persistence and digital synchronization become an indispensable "self-requirement" of the metaverse, which means that all actions and events in the metaverse occur in real time and have lasting effects.

Put your body straight to the center of the argument

Real-time can be considered to be the other side of the sense of presence, and it is also a problem that the Internet has not really solved before, which contains two connotations: one is that communication technology can support agents to perform actions at the same time; the other is that the timeliness of actions needs to be embedded in the platform settings.

In a simulated environment, the agent can be a person, many people, or non-human, and in addition, the user can be represented by many entities called avatars, and can also be represented by many software agents; so in such a metaverse system full of a large number of agents and avatars, it is necessary to ensure that all actions, reactions, and interactions must occur in a virtual environment with real-time sharing and space-time continuity. This can be achieved by fully improving the computing efficiency of the computer and enhancing the computing power of the computer, which is also the technical limitation that Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 cannot truly achieve real-time.

Agents and avatars are directly involved in physical problems. Zuckerberg used his own cartoon avatar in his metaverse vision speech promoting Meta, but he ultimately wanted the metaverse to include lifelike avatars that would feature more realistically and engage in many of the same activities we do in the real world.

"Our goal is to have both realistic and stylized avatars to create a deep sense of being with people," Zuckerberg said at the rebranding conference.

If avatars are really on the way, then we will need to face some tough questions about how we can present ourselves to others. How do these virtual versions of ourselves change how we feel about our bodies, for better or worse? It can be expected that some people will be excited to see avatars like themselves, while others may worry that this will make the body image problem worse. If social media is a lesson for the past, we need to further discuss why virtual avatars in the metaverse have an impact on how people feel and live in the real physical world.

With the launch of the new technological revolution in the second half of the 20th century, there was a "physical shift" in many disciplines, including communication studies. The "body" is receiving more and more attention, and this attention has increased unabated in recent years. A large part of this is because a series of digital media brought about by the new technological revolution are building a culture of de-body, from computers to smartphones to wearable devices and virtual reality headsets, these new media spawned by the digital revolution are invariably replacing "physical presence" with "remote presence", as the American scholar John Durham Peters said: "Putting the body straight at the center of the debate, this is not fashion, but the top priority - Because scientists and engineers are refactoring and restructuring it. ”

In the metaverse, the body becomes the "avatar", existence becomes the "electronic existence", and the effective integration of data and information constitutes the true meaning of "I" in the metaverse. As the most fundamental infrastructure medium of mankind, the body is also historical, cultural, and technological, and as Andre Leroi-Gourhan believes, human evolution consists of two parallel histories: organic history (evolutionary history) and inorganic history (technological history), which are not parallel but converge. The body and mind have both technical and cultural attributes, which are not only phenomenological analysis, but also anatomical and physiological endorsements, such as the characteristics of the human digestive tract that determine the need for a collective life. When the "remote presence" throws the body out, it loses not only the symbolic messages in non-verbal communication that cannot be copied by language, but also the huge cultural and moral meaning carried by the body itself.

The problem that social media wanted to solve since its inception was how to achieve the presence of communication in the absence of a physical technology. As Bill Gates said in 1999, "If we're going to replicate face-to-face communication, what do we need to replicate the most?" We're going to develop software for people in different places to meet together — software that allows participants to interact and make them feel good, preferring to be present remotely in the future. ”

However, if the metacosm is still excluded from interaction while simulating the sensory experience of the body, then the social contract of the metacosmic space will weaken its binding force (as we see in cyberspace today as chaos and hostility), and a virtual community aimed at meeting the other will find it difficult to truly achieve a kind of "communication to the other" because of the invisible nature of the body and the cultural structure behind it.

In the metaverse, the body is always a balance that needs to be carefully maintained: the avatar technology must take a delicate route, both to maintain sufficient authenticity to be faithful to people's identities, but not to threaten the mental health of the people behind the avatar.

We live forever elsewhere

Modern society is based on visual media, and it can be said that the "naturalized" existence, normal operation and source of legitimacy of modern society are all "writing". Since the 19th century, almost every "new medium" has been a tribute to writing: photography is "writing" with light, phonographs are "writing" with sound, and even the new Internet media that are constantly developing new technologies and creating countless new terms today are "writing" in code. Writing completes a substitution of space and time - replacing time with space, because space is the only object that human beings can shape relative to time, so when the writing medium media mediates the face-to-face communication before modern society, "presence" becomes an "illusion" mediated by various audiovisual media. In the information revolution, how to simulate the sense of presence in the communication mediated by various media has become the interest and mission of digital technology.

Once upon a time, the presence of the body was a prerequisite for first-hand experience. However, the evolution of media technology has changed this. Shared experiences are originally based on daily life and passed down from generation to generation. Information, the main output of the medium, turns the life experience into an endless news headline. The knowledge of events and characters acquired through the consumption of information overwhelms the narrative of experiences. Information creates a world of abundant events but little experience. Experiences gradually take place outside of us, gaining autonomous life and becoming a spectacle, and we become spectators of this spectacle. In the process, however, the spread of events loses the authority of the narrative.

Now, one can become an audience for some kind of social performance in the absence of a body. The stage of such a performance cannot be marked with specific locations, and as a result, the social significance of the physical structure that once divided society into many unique communicative environments was becoming less and less significant. Communication technology allows citizens to establish a degree of connection with physically absent actors and social processes through which their experiences and behavioral choices are restructured.

Historically, for pre-modern people, absent sources of power—such as the expanded rule of monarchs and churches—were destined to be invisible and impenetrable. With the proliferation of diffusion technology, the situation becomes very different. These technologies reinforce the potential to forge a "working connection" between the intrusion of the local living world and the "outside" world, while at the same time creating new long-distance relationships through symbolic spreading: "in-person experience" and "mediated experience" are increasingly intertwined.

What all this points to is that the place is separated from space, creating a new relationship between "presence" and "absence". In pre-modern societies, space and place were always the same, and for most people, for the most part, the spatial dimension of social life was governed by "presence," i.e., regional activity. The advent of modernity, through the incubation of various other elements of the "absence", increasingly separates space from the place, and from the point of view of location, away from any given face-to-face interaction situation.

On the current Internet, and in the future metaverse, an ID, an imaged existence on the line can indicate that we are present, but behind these symbols, who the individual on the other end of the screen is, and in what state it interacts with me, is unknown. Although information technology can give students the opportunity to access a large number of online learning resources, they can also enter the immersive classroom through virtual reality technology, and they can also produce their own multimedia works or enter the learning community to get feedback on machine learning, but reality-based connections are always lacking, students lack the presence of peers, teachers and students cannot confirm each other's information reception in interaction, and lack face-to-face real experience. While digitalization provides us with the convenience of receiving information online without synchronization, it also brings about the disappearance of a sense of space and meaning. We are not without surprise to find that the meaning transmitted through the real space and the sense of presence of the body is far from being simulated digitally, and the existence of schools, cinemas, churches and other places is to explain the importance of physical presence for interactive rituals and emotional meaning.

However, we must acknowledge that "networked survival" is where we live today. It can be said that we have come for the first time from a world of "confidants in the sea, and neighbors in the world", to a world where "confidants in the sea, neighbors are like the end of the world". From now on, due to the disturbance of the virtual world, we will always be present and always absent, and in a fashionable way, we will always live elsewhere.

Technology should make

The core human experience has gotten better

We can also make different observations about what Si Xiao said from "online" to "present.". Not everyone agrees with Zuckerberg or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's unwavering metaversal zeal. John Hanke, founder and CEO of Niantic, the developer behind the AR game Pokémon Go, likens the metaverse to a "utopian nightmare." The novels, movies, and TV shows that inspired the concept of a metaverse, he wrote, were actually "warnings of the future of a utopia where technology has gone wrong."

Zuckerberg believes that the virtual world will bring a stronger sense of presence to the people in your life and the places you want to go, while Hank believes that it will play the opposite role. He wrote in his blog:

"We believe that we can use technology to move closer to the 'reality' of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, including ourselves, to get up, go outside, and connect with others and the world around us." It's something we humans are born to do, the result of 2 million years of human evolution, so these are the things that make us happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better, not replace them. ”

Strictly speaking, the debate between the values of the real world and the digital world is unlikely to be fully resolved. In the future, those who think the physical world is more important will say that others have problems in the virtual world, and vice versa.

Sherry Turkle, an American scholar who has studied the psychology of online connectivity for more than three decades, has been calling for a "return to conversation" for years. Originally fully focused on virtual spaces, she was fascinated by a new question: What really happens in a world where many people say they'd rather text than talk? She studied family, friendship, and love. She has studied secondary schools, universities and the workplace. She was struck by the fact that if people stopped talking face-to-face, or couldn't focus on talking with electronic devices, one of humanity's most precious qualities— empathy— would decline.

We're used to connecting all the time, but at the cost of us bypassing conversations. Five years ago, when I was invited to write a recommendation for Turkel's "Reopening Conversation," I wrote: "There is an urgent need to rediscover the recognition that eloquence is cheap and that conversation is priceless. "At least in open and spontaneous conversations, we allow ourselves to be fully present and show vulnerability. We learn to make eye contact, be aware of the other person's posture and tone, comfort each other, and challenge each other with reason and moderation. Because of all this, empathy and intimacy thrive. In these conversations, we learn who we are and learn to self-reflect.

Empathetic conversation skills are complemented by the ability to be alone. In solitude, we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves for conversational content that is real and belongs to us. If we can't gather ourselves together, we can't recognize who the other person is. If we can't stand being alone, we turn others into the people we need. If human beings do not know how to be alone, they will only know how to be alone. While I don't want to over-oppose online, presence, conversation, solitude, along Turkel's lines, we can ask a challenging question: Does uninterrupted connection, fantasy presence, plunge humanity deeper into loneliness?