Six Episodes in the Cultural History of the Metaverse

We constantly hear about the newness of the metaverse, this interactive 3-D world that is opening before our eyes. We are often reminded of the immediate precedents -- chat rooms, pen and pencil role-playing games, and the fiction worlds of Wiliam Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Today I'm looking at a few cultural transitions of the past four centuries, with the rough thesis that virtual space has come to us through a long and fairly continuous evolution.

1. Diaries and the Novel
Medieval texts, even the most adventurous, were written as allegories for the moral imagination, to serve the spiritual improvement of the reader. Secular literature developed the very different role for the readers imagination that we know today: the reader was to actively put themselves into the scenery of the book and interact empathetically with the characters as peers. Diaries, validating the everyday experiences of the new middle class, are inseparable from the birth of the novel. With widespread education and industrial printing techniques, the novel became a hugely significant virtual space, opening up to philosophical and political debates of the day, and transforming popular culture and the popular imagination.

2. Realistic Art and Photography
Perspectival geometry and illusionistic painting techniques were available centuries before their widespread use. Most medieval art was religious in purpose, and symbolic and allegorical in function. The popular imagination had to evolve, opening up secular and scientific 'uses' of art and a way of seeing that put value on the reproduction of the visible world. Similarly, much of the technical apparatus of photography was available before the first camera. Pinholes, mirrors and reflective spheres were used by painters to help capture scenes. The ideal of versimilitude and the accompanying way of seeing had to become widespread enough to inspire the first camera. Photography then went through a long adolescence, while the culture caught up with the idea that the 'space' of a photograph could be a worthy place to exercise the artistic eye and the imagination.

3. History Writing
When did the past become a place? The modern view of history makes it a world of reconstructed detail, a world that we can imagine and occupy. With the advent of archeology, history writing became a scientific pursuit presenting tableaus in increasingly vivid and visual language. This kind of history serves to help us visualize new information, but it can also serve a persuasive purpose, engaging our emotions in political narratives such as nationalism.

4. Wilderness and the Foreign
Wild lands in the European imagination were not thought of as 'places' -- they were simply the realm of danger and terror. The Romantic expression of terror as a form of the sublime, or possibly even of beauty, opened up the land between settlements as a place appropriate for the imagination to roam, and thus appropriate for physical exploration. In similar vein, most early cultures described themselves as "the people" or "the center of the world" and dismissed other cultures quite straightforwardly as barbarians. There was little motivation to see other countries as understandable places, or other cultures as equivalent variations on ones home culture. With the Enlightenment, foreigners were promoted from being simply uninteresting (or dangerous) to being exotic. This sort of curiosity was often mutual, such as between China and Europe from the 16th century forward. and it has taken over a century of post-colonial cultural exchanges and advances in transportation to bring us to the level of mutual respect and interchangeability of cultures we enjoy today.

5. The Counter-Reformation
The churches of the counter-reformation can be described as the first multi-media immersive virtual spaces. They combined illusionistic architectural perspective, realistic painting, theatrical sequences, and elaborate meditative exercises to build a vivid map of the eternal life in the parishoner's imagination. The result was not a static image but rather a detailed sequence of vignettes, following the passion of Christ, and the progress of the believer's soul in the afterlife. I can't resist also mentioning here the elaborate private cultures of the Masons, Odd-Fellows and other brotherhoods -- clearly the first role-playing guilds -- who combined religious symbolism with borrowed scenes from exotic cultures.

6. Mozart
Mozart and his generation brought a new kind of symbolic language to music. There are many stages in the emergence of secular music, but with Mozart one sees music treated as a virtual space, where elements of the social and natural worlds are presented in quite literal terms. The listener is invited to actively imagine each person, place and event they appear in the auditory 'space' of the music. And if that isn't vivid enough, then of course there are the operas, stuffed with visual cues, dialogue and dramatic sequences.

We know that something quite new has happened -- technology advances have made it possible to build immersive, multi-sensory virtual spaces shard by individuals around the world. But I would like to think that the long cultural history of the virtual balances out the novelty in important ways. First, we benefit from the fact that our senses and imagination have been trained to make sense of virtual experiences -- we are ready for this. Second, we have a ton of content that we can easily import into this new space, like opera, fiction, photography, etc. Certainly this new space will open up new forms, but it can't hurt to have the old stuff there, too. And then there are all those fears to be overcome -- will the metaverse destroy our social lives, our local cultures, maybe our souls? Maybe, but if so, four centuries of popular culture and new media have probably done most of the work already!


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Clearly this is a quick blog post, not an academic paper. You might enjoy these books, though, which are probably among the sources of my thoughts on the subject.

D.W. Robertson. A Preface to Chaucer
Erwin Panofsky. Perspective as Symbolic Form
Susan Sontag. On Photography
Roland Barthes. Empire of Signs
Edmund Burke. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Wye Jamison Allanbrook. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart