The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Data-Driven Smart Urbanism: On Post-Pandemic Governance through the Prism of the Logic of Surveillance Capitalism

Unveiling the Metaverse: A survey of user perceptions and the impact of usability, social influence and interoperability

This review explores the Metaverse, focusing on user perceptions and emphasizing the critical aspects of usability, social influence, and interoperability within this emerging digital ecosystem. By integrating various academic perspectives, this analysis highlights the Metaverse's significant impact across various sectors, emphasizing its potential to reshape digital interaction paradigms. The investigation reveals usability as a cornerstone for user engagement, demonstrating how social dynamics profoundly influence user behaviors and choices within virtual environments. Furthermore, the study outlines interoperability as a paramount challenge, advocating for establishing unified protocols and technologies to facilitate seamless experiences across disparate Metaverse platforms. It advocates for the adoption of inclusive, ergonomically oriented designs aimed at enhancing user participation. It addresses the ethical and societal challenges posed by the Metaverse, including concerns related to digital harassment, invasive marketing practices, and breaches of privacy. Additionally, the review identifies existing gaps in the literature, particularly regarding the Metaverse's implications for healthcare, its impact on educational outcomes, and the urgent need for empirical data concerning its long-term effects on user psychology and behavior. By providing a comprehensive synthesis of the current understanding of user experiences and challenges within the Metaverse, this paper contributes to the academic dialogue, laying the groundwork for future research initiatives. It aims to steer the development of the Metaverse towards a trajectory that is ethically sound, socially responsible, inclusive, and aligned with societal expectations, thereby fostering a digital realm that upholds the highest standards of integrity and inclusivity.

The rising trend of Metaverse in education: challenges, opportunities, and ethical considerations

Metaverse is invading the educational sector and will change human-computer interaction techniques. Prominent technology executives are developing novel ways to turn the Metaverse into a learning environment, considering the rapid growth of technology. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, people have grown accustomed to teleworking, telemedicine, and numerous other forms of distance interaction. Recently, the Metaverse has been the focus of many educators. With Facebook's statement that it was rebranding and promoting itself as Meta, this field saw a surge in interest in the areas of computer science and education. There is a literature gap in studying the Metaverse's role in education. This article is a systematic review following the PRISMA framework that reviews the role of the Metaverse in education to shrink the literature gap. It presents various educational uses to aid future research in this field. Additionally, it demonstrates how enabling technologies like extended reality (XR) and the internet of everything (IoE) will significantly impact educational services in the Metaverses of the future of teaching and learning. The article also outlines key challenges, ethical issues, and potential threats to using the Metaverse for education to offer a road map for future research that will investigate how the Metaverse will improve learning and teaching experiences.

The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart urbanism: platformization and its underlying processes, institutional dimensions, and disruptive impacts

The emerging phenomenon of platformization has given rise to what has been termed "platform society," a digitally connected world where platforms have penetrated the heart of urban societies-transforming social practices, disrupting social interactions and market relations, and affecting democratic processes. One of the recent manifestations of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform whose data infrastructures, governance models, and economic processes are predicted to penetrate different urban sectors and spheres of urban life. The Metaverse is an idea of a hypothetical set of "parallel virtual worlds" that incarnate ways of living in believably virtual cities as an alternative to future data-driven smart cities. However, this idea has already raised concerns over what constitutes the global architecture of computer mediation underlying the Metaverse with regard to different forms of social life as well as social order. This study analyzes the core emerging trends enabling and driving data-driven smart cities and uses the outcome to devise a novel framework for the digital and computing processes underlying the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities. Further, it examines and discusses the risks and impacts of the Metaverse, paying particular attention to: platformization; the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing non-spontaneous "normality" of social order; corporate-led technocratic governance; governmentality; privacy, security, and trust; and data governance. A thematic analysis approach is adopted to cope with the vast body of literature of various disciplinarities. The analysis identifies five digital and computing processes related to data-driven smart cities: digital instrumentation, digital hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization. The novelty of the framework derived based on thematic analysis lies in its essential processual digital and computing components and the way in which these are structured and integrated given their clear synergies as to enabling the functioning of the Metaverse towards potentially virtual cities. This study highlights how and why the identified digital and computing processes-as intricately interwoven with the entirety of urban ways of living-arouse contentions and controversies pertaining to society' public values. As such, it provides new insights into understanding the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the other dimensions of society. Accordingly, it contributes to the scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) by highlighting the societal and ethical implications of the platformization of urban societies through the Metaverse.

The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities: the ethics of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization of urban society

Recent advances in computing and immersive technologies have provided Meta (formerly Facebook) with the opportunity to leapfrog or expedite its way of thinking and devising a global computing platform called the “Metaverse”. This hypothetical 3D network of virtual spaces is increasingly shaping alternatives to the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, as it represents ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. At the heart of the Metaverse is a computational understanding of human users’ cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior that reduces the experience of everyday life to logic and calculative rules and procedures. This implies that human users become more knowable and manageable and their behavior more predictable and controllable, thereby serving as passive data points feeding the AI and analytics system that they have no interchange with or influence on. This paper examines the forms, practices, and ethics of the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities, paying particular attention to: privacy, surveillance capitalism, dataveillance, geosurveillance, human health and wellness, and collective and cognitive echo-chambers. Achieving this aim will provide the answer to the main research question driving this study: What ethical implications will the Metaverse have on the experience of everyday life in post-pandemic urban society? In terms of methodology, this paper deploys a thorough review of the current status of the Metaverse, urban informatics, urban science, and data-driven smart cities literature, as well as trends, research, and developments. We argue that the Metaverse will do more harm than good to human users due to the massive misuse of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization underlying the associated global architecture of computer mediation. It follows that the Metaverse needs to be re-cast in ways that re-orientate in how users are conceived; recognize their human characteristics; and take into account the moral values and principles designed to realize the benefits of socially disruptive technologies while mitigating their pernicious effects. This paper contributes to the academic debates in the emerging field of data-driven smart urbanism by highlighting the ethical implications posed by the Metaverse as speculative fiction that illustrates the concerns raised by the pervasive and massive use of advanced technologies in data-driven smart cities. In doing so, it seeks to aid policy-makers in better understanding the pitfalls of the Metaverse and their repercussions upon the wellbeing of human users and the core values of urban society. It also stimulates prospective research and further critical perspectives on this timely topic.

The Social Shaping of the Metaverse as an Alternative to the Imaginaries of Data-Driven Smart Cities: A Study in Science, Technology, and Society

Science and technology transform the frontiers of knowledge and have deep and powerful impacts on society, demonstrating how social reality varies with each era of the world. As a set of fictional representations of technologically driven future worlds, the Metaverse is increasingly shaping the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, i.e., the outcome of radical transformations of dominant structures, processes, practices, and cultures. At the core of the systematic exploration of science and technology is the relationships between scientific knowledge, technological systems, and values and ethics from a wide range of perspectives. Positioned within science of science, this study investigates the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the wider social context in which it is embedded. Therefore, it adopts an analytical and philosophical framework of STS, and in doing so, it employs an integrated approach to discourse analysis, supported by a comparative analysis of the Metaverse and Ambient Intelligence. This study shows that the Metaverse as a scientific and technological activity is socially constructed, politically driven, economically conditioned, and historically situated. That is, it is inherently human and hence value-laden, as well as can only be understood as contextualized within the socio-political-economic-historical framework that gives rise to it, sustains it, and makes it durable by material effects and networks. This view in turn corroborates that the Metaverse raises serious concerns as to determinism, social exclusion, marginalization, privacy erosion, surveillance, control, democratic backsliding, hive mentality, cyber-utopianism, and dystopianism. This study argues that, due to the problematic nature of the Metaverse in terms of its inherent ethical and social implications, there need to be more explicit processes and practices for enhancing public participation and allowing a more democratic public role in its shaping and control, especially early in the decision-making process of its development—when the opportunity for effective inputs and informed choices is greatest. The novelty of this study lies in that it is the first of its kind with respect to probing the link between the Metaverse and data-driven smart cities from an STS perspective. The main contribution of this study lies in deepening and extending social scientific critiques and understandings of the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities based on the analysis and evaluation of the Metaverse and the warning signals and troubling visions it conveys and animates in order to help construct desirable alternative futures for the greater good of all citizens. The ultimate goal is to structure the Metaverse in ways that are morally acceptable and collectively the most democratically beneficial for society.

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.