We all know Facebook as a social network with which we can always be in exchange with friends, upload pictures or simply inform us about anything. Over the years, under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg, the social network became a company that recruited other platforms and thus grew more and more. As most people may already know, Instagram and Whatsapp are now part of the company. But that’s not all for a long time, Facebook has also been going in the direction of virtual reality technology with the associated company Oculus.
Thus, Facebook is a company that does not only think unilaterally and does not intend to leave it at social networks.
For this very reason, he announced that he would rename the company Facebook “Meta”. According to Zuckerberg, he is pursuing a vision that is future-oriented, that wants to create something new and that is no longer oriented to the present. For that very reason, he said, it was important to him to give the new visions a new name. He wants to create a new “metaverse” in which he creates a new generation of the Internet, with virtual spaces that connect people, similar to a video conference. Unlike a normal video conference, it should feel as if everyone is in the same room. But instead of just looking at the screen or, as in virtual reality, into a pair of glasses, new technologies are being developed to make this possible.
Facebook is having trouble with the news because it hasn’t been completely scandal-free in recent months. When the whistleblower Haugen made new revelations that underpinned the fact that Facebook puts profits above the well-being of its own users and she proved this with internal documents, one could think that Facebook actually had to take responsibility and make up for something. However, instead of a statement on the scandals, only a few would have expected a renewal in the direction of a new future. In addition, many critics ask themselves to what extent we are putting the “new future of the Internet” in the hands of the company, which shone a few months ago by not caring about the security of its users.
Now the question arises, what exactly will change. Simply put, we can say that not much will change at first, except for the change of name. But what will definitely change is our future, in which we don’t just look at a screen, but get the feeling of being there live.
