Gemeinschaft Identity in a Gesellschaft Metaverse

Abstract

For the first time in history, it is possible to use a digital device to rapidly connect, publish, and exchange ideas with people from around the world. Everyone has a voice in this global marketplace of thought, and, as digital citizens, we have an opportunity to step through the looking glass (Carroll, 1865) and to become architects of the future. The 21st century has introduced the dawn of global democratization driven by the convergence of mobile IT with emerging media. In paradoxical ways, however, people can be increasingly mobile and socially connected in public spaces on a global scale, yet feel isolated from community, family, and friends due to a lack of private places that bridge or blend physical and virtual spaces. There is much promise in how the metaverse can help to harmonize the tensions between the need for gemeinschaft (community, family, and private blended places) with gesellschaft (society and public blended spaces). Informal and formal learning environments, blended across physical and virtual locations, can be designed to better harmonize gemeinschaft places with gesellschaft spaces. Innovation through technology in this context is mostly about obtaining strategic value from harmonizing gemeinschaft and gesellschaft with ingenious thinking and courageous will to design and use blended physical and virtual locations in ways unforeseen or unimagined from tactical perspectives on instrumental uses of the metaverse.