Metaverse is a new form of social development

The development of the metaverse has brought about an extremely complex socio-economic picture, which has a positive side and also brings many risks and challenges. At the recently held "Facing the Metaverse: Embracing the Third Wave of Network Society Development Symposium", participating scholars called on the academic community to pay close attention to the impact of the Metaverse on the human economy and society.

Metaverse, as a term, is not a new concept. A more popular saying is that the idea of the metaverse comes from the novel "True Names and Surnames" published in 1981 by American mathematician and computer expert Vernor Vinge, in which a virtual world was creatively conceived. The formal literary expression of the term metaverse appears in the 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche by science fiction writer Neil Stephenson. The novel depicts a vast virtual reality world. Here, people use digital avatars to control the world and compete with each other to improve their status.

Chen Guangjin, director of the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that it can be seen from this that the concept of metaverse was not purely referring to digital technology events at the beginning of its birth, but was creative about the economic and social impacts and major economic and social changes that digital technology development may have. imagination. Cai Jingmin, Secretary of the Party Committee of Anhui University, believes that with the rapid development of network technology and artificial intelligence, the Metaverse has increasingly evolved from a science fiction imagination to an objective phenomenon.

At present, scholars tend to believe that the Metaverse is a digital living space with a new social system. Chen Gang, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of Peking University, and others sorted out the five major characteristics and attributes of the metaverse, namely, social and spatial attributes, the attributes of the transcendence and extension of technological empowerment, the attributes of co-creation by humans, machines and artificial intelligence, and the sense of reality and reality mapping. Attributes, belonging and circulation attributes. Zuo Pengfei, secretary-general of the Informatization Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, once proposed that Metaverse will bring about five major changes in people's lives and social and economic development: from the perspective of technological innovation and collaboration methods, to further improve social production efficiency; A series of new technologies, new business forms and new models will promote the transformation of traditional industries; promote the cross-border derivation of cultural and creative industries, which will greatly stimulate information consumption; reconstruct work and lifestyle, and a large amount of work and life will take place in the virtual world; promote the construction of smart cities and innovate social governance model.

Chen Guangjin said that Metaverse is essentially a process of virtualization and digitization of the real world, which requires extensive transformation of content production, economic systems, user experience, and physical event content. However, the development of the metaverse is gradual, and it is finally formed by the continuous integration and evolution of many tool platforms under the support of shared infrastructure standards and protocols. In a nutshell, the Metaverse is a virtual digital world in the space dimension and a real digital world in the time dimension. In this sense, it is no longer a sci-fi phenomenon, but has developed into a social force with sufficient objectivity, authenticity and independence, independent of human will. What people should do is to face it, greet it, and study it.

At present, human real life begins to migrate to the virtual world. Chen Guangjin mentioned that the new visual scenes produced by Metaverse will allow more people to immerse themselves in the virtual world. How to maintain the positive interactive relationship between the real world and the metaverse, play the positive role of the metaverse, restrain the negative role, and properly solve the problem of digital addiction in the future, requires in-depth thinking.

Metaverse is a brand-new fusion of people's digital behavior and social life, a deep reorganization of human spiritual space and social space under the conditions of new technologies, and a new form of human society that is emerging. Li Youmei, the former vice president of Shanghai University, proposed that the metaverse may bring a series of new social phenomena, new problems and new contradictions, which forces sociological research to face unavoidable new challenges. The traditional sociological research paradigm has been powerless in the face of the metaverse, and it is difficult to exert its due theoretical explanatory power. Facing the new mode of production and social experience of human beings, we need to use new horizons, new methods, and new paths to open up a new world of sociological research; we need to be good at learning new knowledge, dare to innovate theoretically, and promote sociology to realize new integration of disciplinary knowledge and theoretical research. New developments in pedigrees.

Chen Guangjin said that from now on, social sciences, especially sociology, need to pay more attention to the influence of the metaverse, devote more efforts to crack the social code of the metaverse, and make the metaverse a bright universe instead of a dark universe.

The meeting was jointly organized by the School of Sociology and Political Science of Anhui University, the Sociological Theory and Method Research Center of Renmin University of China, the School of Philosophy and Sociology of Jilin University, the School of Ethnology and Sociology of Minzu University of China, the School of Sociology and Psychology of Central University of Finance and Economics, and the Humanities and Social Sciences of Xi'an Jiaotong University. Co-sponsored by the College of Science and the School of Humanities and Social Development of Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University, and undertaken by the Digital Rural Construction Research Institute of Anhui University.