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Today, the internet is a disparate collection of sites, apps and platforms. Because they are separate from one another, they lack interoperability and data portability. So, despite huge advances made through digital transformation, this current model will eventually constrain businesses.
In fact, 95% of executives surveyed for the 2022 Accenture Technology Vision report believe that future digital platforms will need to offer unified experiences, enabling interoperability of customers’ data across different platforms and spaces….Story continues…
By: Michael Biltz & Marc Carrel-Billiard
Source: Plan now for the internet’s transformation by the metaverse and Web3 | VentureBeat
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The term metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson‘s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as programmable avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the internet.
Neal Stephenson’s metaverse appears to its users as an urban environment developed along a 100-meter-wide road, called the Street, which spans the entire 65,536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual real estate is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real Association for Computing Machinery, and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon.
Users of the metaverse access it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user, or from grainy black and white public terminals in booths. The users experience it from a first-person perspective. Stephenson describes a sub-culture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the metaverse; they are given the sobriquet “gargoyles” due to their grotesque appearance.
Within the metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, “to prevent people from walking around a mile high”. Transport within the metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 Express Ports, located evenly at 256 km intervals, and Local Ports, one kilometer apart.
Metaverse development may magnify the social impacts of online echo chambers and digitally alienating spaces or abuse common social media engagement strategies to manipulate users with biased content. Keza MacDonald of The Guardian criticized the utopianism of technology companies who claim that a metaverse could be a reprieve from worker exploitation, prejudice, and discrimination.
MacDonald stated that they would be more positive towards metaverse development if it was not dominated by “companies and disaster capitalists trying to figure out a way to make more money as the real world’s resources are dwindling.”Marketing professor Andreas Kaplan, citing their experience studying Second Life users, argues that the metaverse may have a generally negative societal impact due to their strongly addictive potential.
People with physical disabilities like deafness or blindness are disadvantaged without technologies addressed to accessibility. User addiction and problematic social media use is another concern. Internet addiction disorder, social media, and video game addiction can have mental and physical repercussions over a prolonged period of time, such as depression, anxiety, and various other harms related to having a sedentary lifestyle such as an increased risk for obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Experts are also concerned that the metaverse could be used as an ‘escape’ from reality in a similar fashion to existing internet technologies. Virtual crime like sex abuse, child grooming, and harassment are significant challenges within existing virtual reality social platforms, and may be similarly prevalent in the metaverse. In February 2022, investigations by BBC News and The Washington Post found minors engaging in adult activities in applications such as VRChat and Horizon Worlds despite an age requirement of 13 years or older.
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 refer to eras in the history of the World Wide Web as it evolved through various technologies and formats. Web 1.0 refers roughly to the period from 1989 to 2004, where most sites consisted of static pages, and the vast majority of users were consumers, not producers of content. Web 2.0 is based around the idea of “the web as platform”and centers on user-created content uploaded to forums, social media and networking services, blogs, and wikis, among other services.
Web 2.0 is generally considered to have begun around 2004 and continues to the current day. Web3 is distinct from Tim Berners-Lee‘s 1999 concept for a Semantic Web. In 2006, Berners-Lee described the Semantic Web as a component of Web 3.0, which is different from the meaning of Web3 in blockchain contexts. The term “Web3” was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, referring to a “decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain.”
In 2021, the idea of Web3 gained popularity. Particular interest spiked toward the end of 2021, largely due to interest from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investments from high-profile technologists and companies. Executives from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz traveled to Washington, D.C., in October 2021 to lobby for the idea as a potential solution to questions about regulation of the web, with which policymakers have been grappling.
Kevin Werbach, author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust,has said that “many so-called ‘Web 3.0’ solutions are not as decentralized as they seem, while others have yet to show they are scalable, secure and accessible enough for the mass market”, adding that this “may change, but it’s not a given that all these limitations will be overcome.”
In early 2022, Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Signal, articulated how Web3 is not as decentralized as it appears to be, mainly due to consolidation in the cryptocurrency field, including in blockchain application programming interfaces which is currently mainly controlled by the companies Alchemy and Infura, cryptocurrency exchanges which is mainly dominated by Binance, Coinbase, MetaMask, and OpenSea, and the stablecoin market which is currently dominated by Tether. Marlinspike also remarked that the new web resembles the old web.
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