Mila – Social Blog

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Imagine living in the most advanced and restrictive content-filtering Internet regime, also known as the Great Firewall, in the world: welcome to mainland China. As of the implementation by the Chinese government in 2008, the country blocks Internet users in China from visiting quite an extensive list of foreign websites (Chandel et al., 2019). Such giant censoring and controlling mechanisms ensure that both online and offline the same political values, ideals, and standards are enforced on the population while maintaining China’s infrastructure independent of outsiders (Economy, 2021). Anyhow, with no Twitter, no Facebook, no Google, or YouTube, the internet vacuum was eventually filled in Chinese copycats of those platforms.

One of them is WeChat, which is a super app combining all functions and different Western platforms in one application. What once emerged as a voice messaging platform transformed into a ubiquitous app, with over 1.29 billion active users per month (Statista, 2022). Essentially, within the app there is a variety of functions, basically containing anything you may want to do online, ranging from audio and text messaging, WeChat moments (which is similar to Instagram or Facebook’s timeline), order food delivery, to booking a doctor appointment, reading news, and paying bills (Boyd, 2019). All in one single, integrated application, a convenient and transformative technology you’d say. You’re basically never leaving the app because there is no urge to.

Sounds pretty great, right? Well, using one app to do all these activities enables WeChat to collect a staggering volume of personal data, that Google, Amazon, and Facebook all combined have not been able to achieve. This offers WeChat an immensely powerful and unique position in the market, as it possesses one of the most valuable data resources (Wu & Chingman, 2022). Nevertheless, still positioned within the Great Firewall, WeChat must share its data with China’s cybersecurity law to support the ruling of the Chinese Communist Party to control its citizens and censor speech (Wu & Chingman, 2022). Though previous evidence shows no censorship among users not registered under China-based phone numbers, experiments oppose the opposite, as it reveals that even non-Chinese accounts are subject to surveillance (Knockel et al., 2022). So, be aware because they are watching.

Have you ever used WeChat, or are you familiar with it? I use it occasionally to communicate with family members residing in China and to text my parents because they rather use WeChat than WhatsApp. However, I’ve never known that WeChat has been such a big and powerful, but censoring app deeply integrated into users’ daily lives. No wonder why I see so many Chinese people using it. Would you say it is a super app? Or…

References

Boyd, C. (2019, January 21). WeChat: The evolution and future of China’s most popular app. Medium. Retrieved 25 September 2022, from https://medium.com/swlh/wechat-the-evolution-and-future-of-chinas-most-popular-app-11effa5639ed

Chandel, S., Jingji, Z., Yunnan, Y., Jingyao, S., & Zhipeng, Z. (2019, October). The Golden Shield Project of China: A Decade Later—An in-Depth Study of the Great Firewall. 2019 International Conference on Cyber-Enabled Distributed Computing and Knowledge Discovery (CyberC). https://doi.org/10.1109/cyberc.2019.00027

Economy, E. C. (2021, July 7). The great firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s internet shutdown. The Guardian. Retrieved 25 September 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/29/the-great-firewall-of-china-xi-jinpings-internet-shutdown

Knockel, J., Parsons, C., Ruan, L., Xiong, R., Crandall, J., & Deibert, R. (2022, January 24). How International Users Unwittingly Build up WeChat’s Chinese Censorship Apparatus. The Citizen Lab. Retrieved 26 September 2022, from https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/

Statista. (2022, July 27). Number of active WeChat messenger accounts Q2 2011-Q1 2022. Retrieved 25 September 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-wechat-messenger-accounts/

Wu, Y., & Chingman, Y. (2022, September 22). WeChat warns users their likes, comments and histories are being sent to China. Radio Free Asia. Retrieved 26 September 2022, from https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wechat-09082022183307.html

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Imagine being immersed in an interactive virtual simulated reality where you will be working, building relationships, and playing games. A science-fiction dream not far from turning into a reality. Fascinating you’d say, though, is it a step further to disconnect us from reality? This phenomenon is called the Metaverse, a virtual universe, in which we will be represented through avatars or holograms, and we can interact with each other as if we are absorbed in a futuristic game.

The new paradigm will seamlessly blur out the lines between our physical reality and digital virtuality, combining various different platforms ranging from gaming, retail, and education, to perhaps entirely new experiences (Mystakidis, 2022). Technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence deem such an interconnected web of information and communication feasible (Lee et al., 2021). While the concept of the metaverse, now at its earlier stages, continues to be advanced and developed, it will certainly be the next disruption of the internet. In particular, as already more than 120 billion dollars, this year alone, is invested to further refine the infrastructure and technology (McKinsey & Company, 2022).

So, how, for instance, can we imagine such a world? To illustrate, you have designed your own dream home in the virtual world, where you can invite your metaverse friends over to have a chat. They will appear virtually, in avatars or holograms made available through augmented, mixed, and virtual reality, at your home. You can thus socialize, but also do some business, shop, game, and many other things like in real life. To put it easy, it is essentially the same as living your life in reality, but without physical boundaries. Accordingly, it is living in a parallel world where you can create a life you have always dreamed of.

But, isn’t it another way of keeping people detached from the actual reality of touching, feeling, and real presence in the world? I certainly do think so. It may have sounded quite fascinating, though if we look at the world today and where it is headed, I am worried that the metaverse will be creating a very distorted dystopian future. The new generation will not fully experience real freedom any more, when living in such a virtual world.

What do you think, is the metaverse going to be a hope or doom for the future generation?

References

Lee, L. H., Braud, T., Zhou, P., Wang, L., Xu, D., Lin, Z., … & Hui, P. (2021). All one needs to know about metaverse: A complete survey on technological singularity, virtual ecosystem, and research agenda. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05352.

McKinsey & Company. Meet the metaverse: Creating real value in a virtual world. (2022). McKinsey & Company. Retrieved 12 September 2022, from https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/new-at-mckinsey-blog/meet-the-metaverse-creating-real-value-in-a-virtual-world

Mystakidis, S. (2022). Metaverse. Encyclopedia, 2(1), 486–497. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia2010031

We Chat, They Watch

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Metaverse: a distorted dystopian future?

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