Studies on the long-term effects of frequent pornography use reveal that it often morphs into ever more risky forms of behaviour. These can include extra-marital affairs, seducing of work colleagues, making indecent phone calls, or something even more serious such as assault.
Users often report developing problems with intimacy. They feel they can't enjoy sexual experiences because they're addicted to the unreal, often infantilised versions of human interaction.
For most people, the first engagement with the multiverse will be innocent enough. It will feature what I call "sociable media", the next iteration of social media.
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This is where people use VR devices to place their 3D online avatars in virtual spaces, for meetings with avatars of friends or colleagues. The experience will be immersive, in a way the current internet is not - except, perhaps, among the gaming community.
Because the metaverse is so immersive, it will multiply the impact of the internet, perhaps exponentially, in both positive and negative ways.
On the benefits side of the ledger, this virtual multiverse will create new opportunities for mass collaboration, innovation and much more realistic levels of social connectivity online.
Already, major companies in sectors such as retail and entertainment see the positive potential here. They're spending heavily to establish a presence in this network of online worlds. Today, the market size of the metaverse globally sits at around $47.69 billion. By 2028, that's expected to explode to $800 billion.
On the flip side, though, heavy engagement with the metaverse may increase our already significant problems with "absent presence" and "constant (or continuous) partial attention". Both are making it harder for people to focus in an age of almost constant online distraction.
Related to this is the challenge of "shallow think". Studies show that, because of our constant multi-tasking online, we tend increasingly to think broad and shallow, rather than narrow and deep. We know a little about a lot rather than a lot about a little. We don't specialise as much as we once did, yet specialists are still highly valued in every sector of society.
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The metaverse may negatively impact already fraught social interactions, too. Facebook's (at times unethical) internal research has shown that social media messages attract more eyeballs when they appear to provoke anger rather than empathy. People often prefer "hot" responses, to more calm & measured ones. Imagine how much greater that problem might be when we super-charge our internet engagement via the metaverse.
This all-encompassing virtual cosmos will also magnify our problems with data generation and privacy invasion.
It's difficult to assign definite figures to such things, but some estimates have the value of the global data economy at around $3 trillion. In 2017, the European Commission estimated that by 2020 personal data would be worth eight per cent of the EU's total GDP. Yet we, the sources of the data, derive very little by way of direct benefits from its use.
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