It feels as if the Metaverse is being hailed as some sort of future holy land. A place where all your dreams can come true, where you can be whoever, whatever, and wherever you wanna be.
Today, we want you to join us in our latest train of thought. Avatars. More specifically, the possibilities and connotations of living as our avatars in the digital world. In case any of you out there are a little lost as to what exactly an avatar is, for the purpose of this article we will refer to an avatar as a digital representation of a persona.
Avatars Will Become A Standard Reality
If you don’t believe that this is even a relevant conversation because avatars will never be a reality, think again. In a way, we all already have our own avatars. To an extent we all have characters we play in every social media we use, you have your Instagram self, your Linkedin self, your TikTok self…etc. Hell, you might even have your email self. They’re simply a lot more limited with regards to where they have an impact or influence. Meaning that your Instagram self lives on Instagram and nowhere else for example.
It would not be a surprise, however, if as the Metaverse evolves, these fractioned personalities and separate avatars become one once we have the possibility to extend our avatars cross-platform. Many believe that this is where the virtual world is headed. Once this becomes a reality, your avatar will undoubtedly garner importance and influence. So, we think it’s safe to assume that if we are already living online via our avatars -albeit fragmented representations of who we are adapted to each specific platform -, once the infrastructure allows it, a sort of super-Sayan of fragmented avatars will emerge as our one virtual persona.
Your Avatar Can Be Who You Always Wanted To Be
It is no secret that finding oneself is quite the journey, in fact, it’s kind of a journey that never ends. Just when you think you’ve found you, circumstances, priorities, tastes, change, and so does that sense of self. Of who you are, and where you belong. Physically we often look for ways to express ourselves, we cut our hair or try out new clothing styles. Imagine being able to try all of this without having to commit to it? And no, we’re not just talking about the advantages of trying out bangs before you make the mistake of impulsively cutting them on a boring Sunday night. We were thinking more along the lines of being able to explore whole cultures and aesthetics, underground movements or mainstream trends. Trying out all those things via your avatar, seeing not only if they look good but if they feel good too, could translate into a much more seamless journey into our own individual self-expression. Using your avatar to express yourself could as a consequence cause you to slowly but surely gain confidence in expressing yourself in the physical world.
Uncovering your authentic self could be significantly easier thanks to avatars. There are, however, some who believe that the opposite could take place. This would be due to an incapacity of transferring the knowledge learned about oneself from the digital to the physical. And the dangers of living increasingly in the digital world, while neglecting oneself in the physical realm.
Basically what we are trying to say is that at the end of the day, avatars are the technology that will make all of this possible, but whether it is a positive, or negative development depends on the use we give it, as tends to happen with most technological innovations. We can use avatars to dissociate from reality, or we have to use them for positive association. Thus making use of our avatar to motivate and encourage us to be who we always wanted to be.
Avatars Could Help Us Understand Ourselves (And Each Other) Better
When we think about life in the Metaverse as an avatar, we think we have a tendency to imagine the phygital (physical + digital) aspect of it. So in essence, we picture how it will look and the aesthetics of it all. Mostly we envision a physical world translated into the virtual space, but when we think about it, the possibilities that the Metaverse could lay before us when it comes to exploring our internal worlds might be what’s really interesting. For example, perhaps when technology evolves we’ll be able to analyse our feelings better.
Remember those very Millenial mood rings? You know, the ones that really just changed colour depending on temperature? They were all the rage when we were younger. What if thanks to avatars could lead us towards a better understanding of our own internal feelings? And, gosh, maybe change your t-shirt according to the colour associated with a particular mood? Who knows what can be accomplished by finely-tuned algorithms that could analyse your avatar’s conduct, habits, reactions or lack of. This could serve as a basis for understanding ourselves a lot better. And what happens when we understand ourselves? That we can understand each other better too.
All that’s left to ask now is… Who is your avatar? Who do you wanna be?
