How the Metaverse Helps Heal the Challenges of Our Time
Easing into 2023, the idea of being digitally immersed in an environment by choice feels like cultural anathema. Especially as we return to our offices, schools, and family gatherings. Emojis can now be hugs. Applause reactions on screen can now thunder with praise and smiles. The merit of the collaborative tools that became a necessity over the past couple of years are currently being evaluated. In schools, devices are shelved as we all try our best to acclimate back to in person events. We are all navigating a culture shock of sorts as we try to figure out how to navigate a metamorphosis of digital and analog life. In tandem with this, children, technocrats, and video game aficionados alike are quickly figuring out the relationship between virtual and real life. This is not easy and requires us, as humans, to repeatedly practice holding these two realities without judgment. At 228 Accelerator, we believe that it is in this practice that greater understanding can emerge—this is why we offer trainings, community, and more for educators, K-12 explorers, edge finders, and school leaders who wish to become agents of equity primarily within the virtual environments.
Oftentimes, the merit of new technologies is determined based on the world as it is, in the present. While it is common to think this way, using sheer necessity as the rubric for merit leads us to ignoring the utility and potentiality of innovations. Necessity is guarded by the imagination of the present. When cellular phones emerged, it was hard to imagine why anyone would need a phone unwired, let alone a phone to travel with them wherever they went. Older humans who lived part of their lives without phones found it difficult to imagine a world where devices and tablets are ubiquitous. But the makers of the device did not just see the world as it was, they also saw what it could be. While they imagine a world more entertained, more productive, and more efficient, we think there are other qualities worthy of pursuit.
The world is full of problems to solve, traumas to heal, and separations to reconcile. These problems are the challenges of our time. It feels at times that the forces of separation and destruction are losing, and the last thing we need is another wired technology to create more isolation and separation. Our judgment of merit may not determine the speed of development or adoption, but it may eclipse the potentiality of possibility. So let's suspend judgment for a minute and not think so much about the world as it is—let us imagine how it could be.
Imagine a world where we can show up exactly how we were meant to be. Imagine a world where we can express ourselves without judgment and share our vulnerabilities with our peers. Imagine a world where the priority is safety, courage, and love. Imagine if all students, particularly queer students, could access banned book content anywhere around the country, or even better…around the world.
The conditions of the virtual events 228 Accelerator held in the Metaverse space in 2022 allowed for this to happen. Our exploration of the space began small with a 3 part series called Banned Books in the Metaverse. The series was designed to pilot a safer way to teach literature and have rich discussion at a time when political expediency discourages some teachers and leaders from making curricular decisions that create a multicultural and multiracial democracy. We asked people to read, show up, and connect. It was that simple.
We are continuing to pilot and play around with the Metaverse space because there is something special here as it relates to the education revolution. Our metaverse house simultaneously offers a rich setting to practice immersive teaching across geography, and to protect identity. We think this technology is rich for bringing people together and enriching conversations more than ever before. It's in these conversations that we learn about ourselves and each other. In the future, it is our intent to open the space for anyone seeking to explore three of our exciting design challenges!
3 Questions for Educators and Parents
We want to offer 3 design challenges for educators and parents to take on as a way to learn more about Metaverse technologies:
How might avatars (with flexibility in how they are built, customized, presented, etc.) enable an empathy so transformative it reconciles and transcends identity differences?
How might digital spaces reemerge as places where we can explore being our higher selves?
How might our radical imagination drive the purpose and intent of new emerging technologies?
Everyday we wake up with another chance to be better humans. Every new year we get a chance to try again. With every breath we take, we get the chance to live better, love more, understand deeper, and create experiences with the same attention. Should we not imagine, expect, and use our technologies with this intention?
What if we looked at and imagined our technologies not just as tools to make us more productive or make our lives more convenient, channels to tune in to our higher selves? What if we could use technology to imagine new ways of being better humans? Our whole world is trying to emerge from pandemic malaise. We remember, recall, and experience the routine horrors of war, violence, body supremacy, and the dangerously warm January days that are harbingers of a devastatingly shifting climate.
A relentless focus on how the world can and should be, not just as it is right now, is a task worthy of our time, talent, and intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Technologies like virtual reality can help us not only inspire and juice our imaginations, but also make visible the contradictions and tensions of real human experiences. When virtual and tangible are isolated but connected together in an intentional relationship, they can help us understand ourselves and enhance our own collective humanity.
In Burt Bacharach's 1965 composition, and later, Dionne's angelic melody reminded us of what the world needs (love sweet love). Since 1965 we have seen countless technologies come and go, with the need for more love, more justice, and more humanity remaining as evergreen as pine forests. No, love and understanding won't come in a headset and controllers. Avatars alone will not help us understand our cultural tendency to judge and persecute humans based on the bodies they inhabit. But imagining how the use of these technologies with intention and attention might just get us one step closer.
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