Recently, we had a couple of lectures from Serra, who teaches the VR course. I found the topics she covered very engaging, and one thing she brought up which gave me food for thought was the idea of the ‘Digital Twin’, which is a concept being brought very much into the near future by companies such as Meta:

As someone who’s grown up with social media since the age of 11 (and even then as a younger child I was still on sites that let you create an online alter-ego like Club Penguin and Bin Weevils), I am very used to having a digital version of myself online, for anyone to see. It’s something that I only really thought about the consequences of long after I was given access to these kinds of sites as a young child, and to be honest I really wish I had not been given access to them until I was a lot older. There’s a strange sort of relationship that a lot of people of my generation seem to have with their digital lives – they already feel like an extension of reality, like a whole different world where we have to present ourselves in a completely different manner. In my experience, this has led to me feeling terribly unsure about who I really am, what I like and dislike, etc. This is most likely due to the sheer abundance of information and opinion that is spewed out at social media users on a daily basis. Whilst there has been good that has come from this technology, I feel as though we are losing sense of ourselves already.

That’s why I’m quite terrified for concepts such as the Metaverse to become reality. I already feel uncomfortable with the digital version of myself as it is, and I have made great effort in recent months to try and mentally detach myself from it. I do not want my life to rely on this completely fake reality where I have a bad-looking caricature of myself being the only representation that most people see of my thoughts and my body. Especially when this caricature is owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

I remember watching the documentary ‘Life 2.0’ a few years ago, which was about a site called Second Life which in many ways is a precursor to the Metaverse. People would spend hours and hours every day on this site, looking at their alter-ego, maybe trying to escape their day-to-day life. I remember thinking then, that it was a bit strange and lonely. In my opinion, concepts such as these should not become part of mainstream culture.

Maybe this is why I’ve had some trouble engaging with this unit so far. All in all, I am not very interested in VR at all, and I believe people should seek real life experiences. I understand there can be some educational uses (e.g. learning how to perform surgery, etc.) but other than this, I really fail to see the excitement in it. This isn’t to say I’m right and everybody else is wrong, but the digital world is something I personally try to stay away from as much as possible (with not much success).