Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Reuters is having a free webinar tomorrow on the future of the Metaverse featuring several esteemed panelists, which you can register for here.

But wait a minute: If we're so excited about the Metaverse, why are we talking about it… on the web? Especially when there are a number of metaverse platforms on the market which could easily host a hundred or more attendees, with an overflow crowd who could watch it streamed on YouTube and Twitch. 

I put it to Reuters' event manager Pete Carkeek, who defends the use of webinars to talk about the Metaverse this way:

“The reason we’re running this discussion in a traditional webinar format, rather than on any kind of metaverse platform, is because we’re targeting tech and business leaders from across a whole variety of industries. Understanding of – and access to – emerging platforms is limited currently in many of the industries we work with so – for the time being at least – it’s much easier for people to access this kind of content on the open web than anywhere else. This may change in the next few years, but for now this works for us.”

And that's fair enough — there's definitely a human inclination to privilege ease of use over everything else. And Reuters is hardly the sole culprit here. So far, roughly all of my conversations with media outlets interested in the Metaverse were conducted not on a metaverse platform, but instead, on Zoom or Google Meets — or almost as often, on an actual phone. Similarly, the most avid and widely-shared conversations about the Metaverse among people in the industry rarely occur on a metaverse platform itself, but on Twitter and LinkedIn — or via webinars.

Don't even get me started with people telling me how the Metaverse is going to completely change business and culture — from the stage of an actual, in-person conference at a fancy hotel.

But for the record, it is possible to have it both ways. In 2021, for instance, I hosted a conference in Breakroom, a metaverse platform architected for enterprise use, with Metaverse author Matthew Ball and the Washington Post’s Gene Park; about 100 attended live as avatars, and many thousands watched the recorded event on YouTube. (Watch above) What's more, being in a virtual world context was part of the experience, showing what's possible, in a tangible way, with the technology we were literally talking about at the same time.

What is more likely the case is this: Many evangelists and media outlets interested in the metaverse as a business opportunity are not personally interested or familiar with the experience themselves, or they do not have the extra time required to learn a new virtual world UX, customize an avatar, and so on.

But this tends to undermine any overly-broad statement they then make about the Metaverse: If you really do think it’s the next generation of the Internet, why aren’t you using it as much as you can? 

Hopefully that topic comes up in tomorrow's webinar. Which again, you can register to watch here.