Micro-Social: An emerging human behavior in an always-on society (aka Metaverse)

So there is a lot of buzz about Metaverse and yes, I do have a lot to say about it but for now, I want to stick to Micro-Social. My future articles on Metaverse will make a lot of sense with this as a backdrop. I always look at emerging trends in technology with a sort of historical lens as to how our society has traversed all the steps before that point in time. It is a prime indicator of where that new trend will take us which we refer to sometimes as “history repeating itself”.

Here we are talking about an evolving human behavior projected online which by definition does not represent the whole person as the context is narrow vs the IRL where you get to know a person from various data points. This is the behavior that is underpinning all the ML algorithms out there as that is all (and only) the context available for it to “know” us humans(see, now you know how future articles on Metaverse will be interesting…).

To identify this behavior and dive deep into it, I am calling it #MicroSocial for lack of a better word. It is using an existing word from the field of Sociology, called Microsociology but we are going to focus on this behavior in an online forum where people project a version of their IRL-self.

Definition of Microsocioloy:Small-scale sociological analysis that studies the behavior of people in face-to-face social interactions and small groups to understand what they do, say, and think.        

In this case, we are talking about a specific example of micro-sociology called Symbolic Interactionism.

Definition of Symbolic Interactionism:The theory that society is possible because of the shared meanings and social patterns created during social interactions.        

With that understanding in mind, I am defining Micro-Social Behavior as follows:

Definition of Micro-Social:An online human behavior representing partial projection of their actual behavior in the society.        

Ok, enough about some theory around human behavior and the subject of Sociology. I want to tie this to a few things we all have noticed about the recent emergence of smaller groups connecting online and then influencing, pushing envelop, or outright hijacking overall social discourse that used to only happen with much large participation previously. Some of the examples include political discourse being driven by opinions rather than concrete data(started with the 2016 election), investing decisions influenced by just online rumor mills(aka meme stocks) or you can look at recent valuations of unicorns pre-IPOs to eat dust when met with stringent realities of running a profitable company. So what is at work here? One word(well it is two and a half actually), MicroSocial Behavior.

We are more connected to people that we know less and less connected to people that we have known all our IRL. To actually see the impact of this we have to look a little more in history when we started sharing information with each other, from petroglyphs to humans learning languages, to relatively recent (in terms of human evolution) spread of printed newspapers and then comes radio and television as part of mass media where most of our society got similar set of information and then debated different facets of the information to come closer as a society to have a ‘common understanding’. This meant that we had so far a common knowledge base that we all operated under as a society. Enter the era of parallel worlds that now exist with the internet allowing people to perpetually stay in the bubble. This creates multiple “versions” of society where the entire fabric that holds the society is vastly different than in another version of society. The information being shared by people in these “versions” of society differs and consumption of this information then creates knowledge for the relatively younger population who subscribe to this information to be absolute truth. Imagine this happened to a group of African Elephants that depend on historical information shared by older elephants of the herd on available water sources. This knowledge allowed the herd to safely migrate and sustain their population. If we extend the same ‘multi-version’ society then each version will have a different map of water sources! You guessed it right, we will not survive as a species.

That is the concern here as we embark on this new journey with metaverse upon us. Each of the big tech companies is approaching building metaverse in a way that will help that company make the most money. Eventually, you will see multiple metaverse existing, just like we had multiple social networks and we know how that turned out. We will talk about those details in subsequent articles. The concern here is that the micro-social behavior of the population in that metaverse will be less genuine, a ‘version’ of that real person which will then create a society that is at war with itself. I remember the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0 which was fueled by the interactivity online by groups of people that created some of the best ways to share knowledge across the entire planet. Today’s YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc are the early versions of the upcoming metaverse(s) but at least those online forums were part of a single society and our problem was just to get everyone on a single page. With Web 3.0 as the infrastructure of the new world, filled with multiple metaverses might get entirely impossible to bring everyone on the same page. I am sure that there are a lot of positives that will come out of it but we as people will also have to start taking more responsibility for what kind of world we want to hand off our future generations as it is not the responsibility of anyone company (be it LinkedIn or Facebook) or a single country, it is the responsibility of all of us and when one of us fails, all of us fail.

We need to ensure that we build the next generation of the platform(s) with an AI that is less biased, open, understands its limits, respects the privacy at the core, separates corporate interests vs societal, and brings a newer sense of online persona. Less emphasis on the rush to provide capabilities to buying virtual land, NFTs, crypto-currency vs deliberation to understand the impact of these decisions. We all as technology leaders have a duty to understand what this will do just like our previous generation of leaders understood the gravity and crafted laws around property ownership, currency regulations as well as personal freedom while still being able to govern as a society full of potential.

Let’s build an amazing society together that is open, inclusive, and works for everyone regardless of if it is online or IRL.