Communication and the metaverse

The noise of a digital world

In the digital world we exchange information in so many different ways. We have a global audience, but this proliferation of channels could be removing the real social value from our interactions. Much is made of the metaverse as the future of the internet, but will it help or hinder?

About a decade ago, the CEO of a well-known multinational conglomerate made the following comment on a company-wide web conference:

“I knew something transformational had happened when I realised I spent most of my time talking to people on my laptop whilst checking my email on my phone”

It was used as the opening line for a conversation about the transformational journey that the organisation was on, but it also planted a nagging thought in my mind that has grown into a frustration with the world of electronic communication.

My concern is that, while much of our digital life is now taking place on a couple of devices (the phone and the laptop), our methods of communicating seem to be getting more and more fragmented.

This is something that captured the imagination of the IT vendor community. It’s easy to tell when this happens because as soon as IT becomes interested in something it gets a product name, and in this case the name was “unified communications”.

In Simpler Times

A long time ago, if we wanted to communicate we talked, either face to face or by phone. If we wanted to convey information, and time was not of the essence we sent memos or letters, which then became emails and faxes. Immediate and delayed; synchronous and asynchronous

Essentially, there were two ways of communicating, and they served very different purposes. There was no need to unify them.

Now we’re in a bit of a mess. We have text, voice and video. We have interactive and broadcast. We have peer-to-peer, group and social media. I know it’s a mess because you can’t draw a catchy presentation slide for it and in business that is the very worst type of problem!

There are so many channels of communication now, that keeping up with them all is becoming a full time job. Glance away from your email for a moment to follow your Twitter feed, check Facebook, or WhatsApp a friend and you lose control of your inbox. Heaven forbid if you actually call someone or listen to your voicemail (yes, some people really still do that).

Not another silver bullet

And this is where Unified Communications tried to come in. This was the silver bullet designed to kill this particular werewolf, and what it promised to do was bring all of your communication together into one place. There are parallels here with today’s metaverse hype. Take a look at the wikipedia definition of unified communications below, and see if you can recognise the similarities:

Unified Communications - A marketing buzzword describing the integration of real-time, enterprise, communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice (including IP telephony), mobility features (including extension mobility and single number reach), audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing (including web connected electronic interactive whiteboards), call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).

Unified communications as a product never emerged, and what did appear under that name didn’t solve the problem. It was all branding and no substance, and the same criticism has been made of the metaverse. Communication is coming at us from so many disparate sources now that there’s simply no way we can absorb it all, nor can we engage with all the channels available.

People are filtering and they’re having to be brutal about it. For some, voicemail and phone conversations are dead; it’s all about messaging. For others, their world revolves around email and even conversations with colleagues in the same room take place via email. Meanwhile they’re interacting with people for whom email is something they rarely look at and seldom respond to. Some believe that donning a headset and entering a virtual world will magically solve all of this. Others dismiss it as impractical fantasy touted by gaming obsessed technophiles. If you’ve ever worn a VR headset for thirty minutes or more, you might understand their scepticism.

The result of all this fragmentation is that far from being a community, we’re more like the stereotype of grumpy teenagers and out of touch parents. We occupy the same space, and share the same experiences, but exchange no communication apart from a few dismissive grunts and barked retorts. We can communicate with anyone in the world and yet we’re as divided as ever.

All talk and no trousers

Each channel of communication attracts a different demographic, and even within those channels we often tune down to only those people who think and act like we do. The famous echo chamber. We talk about the value of diversity, the importance of community and the productivity of collaboration, but what we’re really doing is communicating with a much smaller variety of people than ever before. Essentially we’re mostly talking to ourselves and reinforcing our prejudices and beliefs.

These are not communities to which we belong, they’re cliques. Communities are positive and varied. They introduce us to people with opinions and perspectives different to ours. Cliques by their very nature contain no diversity and encourage intolerance. Communities force us to learn to coexist whilst cliques fulfil our need to interact, without requiring us to listen to differing views.

The communication channels to which we subscribe fail to consolidate information from varied sources. Brave souls try to connect communities by cross-posting, but all this really means is if you miss something on TitTok you can pick it up next year on LinkedIn. There is no gathering of differing views from outside our immediate circle. We hear the same thing again and again every day, and we get no perspective or balance, and there’s no time left for real two-way conversations. It’s all send and no receive. And there’s a much bigger problem. Those who shout loudest win, whilst minorities go unheard.?

Now add into this mix the world of video communication. At the start of 2020, this was a mysterious world to many. By the end of the year, everyone was zooming, teaming, meeting and facetiming, and once again none of these were interconnected. Then the social media platforms joined the party and the number of channels grew again.

Bursting the bubble

Unified communication in its true sense doesn’t exist yet, but if it did it would do several things:

It would allow us to absorb communication in the way we want rather than having communication foisted upon us via the channel chosen by the sender. If we want to receive messages via email why shouldn’t we? If a friend wants everything via text on their messaging app of choice, good for them. Why not? Why should we all have to engage on every channel when all we want is the content we care about. Listening is a rare enough skill as it is without having to become a technology juggler to do it.

It would allow us to share information with individuals, groups, communities and the world simply by sending it. We shouldn’t have to find out which channels people are listening to, and join those channels to participate. If we want to distinguish how we communicate surely it would be better for us to create digital avatars for ourselves. Avatars that present one part of who we are (such as a working persona separate from a social persona) with which people can interact by choice. If you want to follow someone, you just follow their Avatar and you see all their content. You no longer have to find every channel on which they're broadcasting and deal with the duplicates, and they don’t have to spam all the channels just to find the one you’re watching.

If the metaverse is anything, it should be this. An interactive environment from which I can learn and into which I can contribute. A seamless experience that doesn’t require me to hop from one vendor platform to another for fear of missing out. A single universal place that I can visit safely, protected from abuse and harassment. Not a fancy VR world requiring bulky headsets in which people trade virtual real estate. Not a place dominated by crypto currencies, grifters and glowing adverts. Something I can access anytime and anywhere, dipping in and out as I see fit. To succeed it must be effortless.

When the world wide web first emerged we accessed it through a single thing - the browser. Everything was at our fingertips, and this is what the metaverse should be. The next evolution of the internet, supporting richer and more natural ways of interacting with information and people. More accessible, more intuitive and more universal. A single window into a global village.

Oh. and this time it needs to belong to all of us.

This, and other articles can also be found on my personal blog site .