Metaverse and Social Media: Is Metaverse the Future of the Social Media?

Social media applications have become a very important element in our daily lives. It gives us many opportunities from following daily events to sharing photos, from exploring new places to instant messaging with our friends. In fact, for many people, it is more of a news source than a newspaper. According to the Oxford University Reuters Journalism Study Institute Digital News Report, approximately 73% of readers living in Turkey stated that they see social media as a source of news. It has been observed that Facebook is the most used social media application as a news source. After the Facebook files were leaked in the past months, in October 2021, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the “Metaverse”, which he described as a more immersive and concrete internet that we can be in, and announced that the name of the Facebook company was changed to Meta. We learned that Metaverse’s Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) sets allow us to go wherever we want and participate in various activities with the characters we created virtually. So, can this metaverse we are talking about affect the social media applications we use in our daily lives ? Can it dominate the social media applications used by millions of people ?

First of all, it should be noted that the fact that the metaverse has a potential advertising, event and commercial capacity shows that it can pave the way for a social media order that may occur in this virtual world. Significant amounts of money and resources were invested in the metaverse in 2021. Platforms like Meta and important companies like Nike have invested huge amounts of money in the metaverse. This shows us that large companies think that this virtual universe can become the social media center of the future. It is thought that advertisements in today’s social media can take a more effective role in the metaverse. As a result of IZEA’s research, 73% of people observed that advertisements in the virtual world could be noticed and 42.2% of them could remember the advertiser brands. This situation should attract the attention of some social media influencers, as it has been stated that 56% of influencers have already started to work on the metaverse, and some of them earn income thanks to the metaverse.

Among some of the claims made, the video conversations we have made on the social media may be more realistic in the metaverse. It is thought that many factors that can be provided by face-to-face meetings but not by video calls made on online platforms can be provided by the metaverse. The 2-dimensionality of the video calls we can make through social media or video conferencing platforms can be made 3D in the metaverse universe and the conversations can be made more fluent and productive for the listeners using hand gestures made by the virtual characters. It is said that Instagram, one of the social media platforms, will add three-dimensional avatars that can strengthen the perception of virtual reality with its upcoming update. It is thought that the possibility of using these avatars in stories and messages will be offered to the user with this update. As it can be understood from here, we can say that Instagram is already starting to keep up with the metaverse.

The fact that many activities are online due to the COVID-19 virus, which affects almost every area of our lives in the current period, has led people to use some online meeting platforms.

However, there are considerations of organizing such activities in the metaverse environment, as if we were physically there. In this way, the metaverse offers us an environment where we can be there with our own virtual character, meet other people and socialize, and witness events as if we were there physically, through virtual reality glasses. In fact, some ideas such as only those with NFT tickets can enter some important events, shows us how important and valuable the NFT field can be for the metaverse. Atari company recently announced that they are building a Las Vegas-style cryptocurrency casino in a virtual world called Decentraland. In this virtual world, it is planned that people can play games with cryptocurrencies, including Atari Token. It should be said that the probability of creating special NFT tickets to enter this virtual casino (maybe we can say “casinos” in the future) is not at all low.

To conclude, It may be too early to say that the Metaverse will surpass today’s social media applications. However, it is an undeniable fact that the virtual universe created is growing with the serious investments made by large companies and will become more popular for people over time. Believing that the metaverse can give more opportunity than the social media applications we use today is not a very difficult dream to establish anymore. It may be a little difficult to have a virtual universe that can completely dominate today’s social media, but we can easily talk about a metaverse that is starting to affect social media companies even now. We are talking about a metaverse that will transport us to the concreteness of the internet. Who knows, maybe we can meet at a virtual event.