A Blank Slate for E-commerce: Why We Don’t Trust the Metaverse

Back in 2011, an article published on the Wired website asked whether social networks would ever replace offline socializing. At the time, Snapchat and the now-defunct Google+ were in their infancy, Tiktok didn’t exist, and Facebook had just entered its prime. Just over a decade on, the social media landscape looks very different but many of the same basic ideas still influence creators’ decisions. 

A Social Species

A desire to add social capabilities to many different experiences is one of these ideas. Where Facebook has its Messenger app, the Betfair website has what it calls live casino. This riff on online blackjack and other table games injects a social aspect in the form of a human presenter, who replaces the computer that customarily handles each game. Players get to chat with their dealer as they might in an offline casino.

Of course, all this social stuff is a response to the fact that humans are, deep down, a social species rather than the increasingly solitary beasts we’ve become. The scientific journal Nature describes us as dependent on cooperation to “survive and thrive”. Much of this harkens back to our days as much hairier things though, as technology has reduced our dependence on each other.

Still, the explosive popularity of social media would suggest that we’re still a highly social species even in our modern hairlessness. Facebook had almost 3bn users at the beginning of 2023, closely followed by YouTube at 2.5bn. That latter figure raises the question of whether video-sharing websites could supplant the standard text-based ones, as Chinese upstart TikTok recently crossed the 1bn barrier too.

Biometric Data

This brings us neatly around to one of the more recent evolutions in social media – the metaverse. Championed (terribly, to date) by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, the metaverse concept is designed to be a mix of everything funneled through virtual reality. So, it has social aspects, minigames, and spaces where people can meet up to work. With all that virtual space, the metaverse is also friendly to advertisers.

The problem is that the small percentage of the population that’s actually aware of the metaverse doesn’t seem to trust it. Forbes claims that, as a “bridge” between the physical and digital worlds, brands need to rebuild the same faith in consumers that they did during the shift from the high street to the internet. This effectively means that the metaverse is a blank slate for e-commerce. 

The use of VR headsets in the metaverse hasn’t gone unnoticed either. Just like a mobile phone, devices like the Meta Quest 2 are capable of collecting biometric data, which leads to some obvious privacy concerns. Facebook’s record for preserving its user’s information isn’t exactly stellar so Meta seemingly begins its metaverse journey on the defensive, rather than by dazzling with its fresh take on social media. 

Overall, in its current state, Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse seems fated to at least stagnate, if not disappear for a while as VR headsets did in the 1990s.