Ran Hua, postdoctor and assistant researcher at School of Journalism and Communication, Shanghai University
The Metaverse is essentially a new round of "energy exchanges." Communication is closely related to the form of social interaction. So it is necessary to take into account the process of social communication of humans, especially the mass communication, and the macroscopic fabric of society. Some studies predict that it could be nearly three hundred years before most human activities take place in virtual reality. Before that, human digital civilization is bound to enter into an important "transition period" and will be in it for a long time. In the media era, the concept of media in communication studies shows two lines:"apparent existence" and "relational metaphor". Under the trend of deep mediatization, there is a tendency of the former transferring to the latter. On the one hand, evolution of the media concept is accompanied by the risk of communication ethics.On the other hand, Metaverse communication should be based on "relationship" and transcend "relationship" to establish the value pursuit of building stable communication ethics.
For the primary governance of Metaverse, we should define the governance logic in the participatory development process, and also seek the basis for hierarchical governance from the standpoint of transcending relationship."Culture - ethics" can be considered as the central perspective of Metaverse governance."Integrated ethics" should be advocated in the cultural governance of Metaverse. At the primary stage of deep mediatization, we should pay attention to social fission in the "daily life world" and the tension of "mentality" in the cultural governance of Metaverse. When constructing Metaverse communication ethics, we should enthusiastically advocate the social world’s ethical expectation of moral agency and the desire for a better life, actively strengthen the organic unity between everyday moral ethics and agent ethics, and comprehensively promote the integrated ethics with multi-party interaction and participation.
At the same time, we should put emphasis on the ethics of artistic aesthetics in the cultural governance of Metaverse. The Metaverse is a form of civilization brought about by the transmutation of time and space. At the primary stage of Metaverse, social culture is limited to the tension of mentality, but it does not constitute the issue of ideology. Then, the social practice with deep mediatization can establish the order of social interpretation according to the path of "game – art - ethics". However, with the deepening of Metaverse, the governance should integrate with the ethics and practical wisdom of Chinese excellent traditional culture. This requires multi-faceted conceptual dialectics: it is "omnipotent" spatial practice, rather than giving a birth to "omnipotent" people (organizations or other entities); it is growth logic that "everything thrives forever", rather than the Cold War thinking of "zero-sum game"; it is a kind of harmony and unity, and a destiny link to the reality, rather than a rigid thinking that can be cut arbitrarily or of "holding a grudge to the end".The answer is clear.The agency of the social world comes from the process of integrating the "real world” with the “virtual world", and the ideal ethical form of Metaverse lies in the unity of "omnipotent" agents and the "omnipotent" practical context.
Published on August 25, 2022