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Will the Metaverse compound problems that have already come with spending so much of social life and even school and work in a virtual landscape?
Some psychologists are warning of just that likelihood.
Studies have already shown detrimental consequences of social media on the psyches of children and teenagers, though some of the named problems are hardly confined to online settings.
Bullying, harassment, body image and self-esteem are often magnified and distorted in novel ways thanks to technology.
Whether it’s idealized images that are hard to live up to, or rude exchanges that virtual interaction seems to make easier, there’s no doubt that the medium of the internet has affected how people act, and often, how they feel about themselves and deal with life.
And young people, who are most immersed in virtual interaction, while also developing, are pretty clearly most affected.
“All of these new tools, and all of these new possibilities, could be used for good or for evil,” clinical psychologist Mitch Prinstein recently commented about potential dangers of the metaverse in a CNBC interview.
Metaverse: New Worlds, New Problems?
To many who’ve grown up watching movies like Avatar and Ready Player One, the idea of being able to exist in an idealized, self-conceived existence, in which augmented or even wholly virtual realities are making more possible than ever, seems like an exciting and even natural evolution.
But Prinstein, chief officer of the American Psychological Association, said he worries about potential effects of avatars for adolescents.
“You are what other people think about you in adolescence. And the idea of being able to fictionalize your identity and receive very different feedback can really mess with a teenager’s identity.”
Big tech companies like Meta (formerly Facebook), are aggressively marketing immersive metaverse technologies to a youth demographic, just as they gobbled up and pushed hip social media apps like Instagram.
The mental health of that demographic is of little concern to corporations out to build and sell the “next big thing.”
“This is just an exacerbation of the problems that we’ve already started to see with the effects of social media,” Prinstein told CNBC. “This is creating more loneliness. This is creating far more body image concerns [and] exposure to dangerous content that’s related to suicidality.”
Research released this past December by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), claimed that minors were regularly exposed to graphic sexual content, racist and violent language, bullying, and other forms of harassment on VRChat’s platform, which is typically accessed through Meta’s Oculus headsets.
Given the looseness of the way terms like “racist” are thrown around in political battles, and the plentiful sexual content that exists on the current internet, not to mention good old regular entertainment channels, the concerns of the CCDH and psychologists may strike some as overblown.
After all, the metaverse doesn’t even fully exist yet in any mature form as a technology. Blaming the ills of the world, real, exaggerated and imagined, on the metaverse, may be just hopping aboard a trend in another way.
Perhaps the most serious consequence of the incipient technology is how it may be utilized to separate, distance, control, divide and profit off people, rather than truly empowering them.