By Jesse Karjalainen

Everyone is talking about it more and more. It’s suddenly everywhere. But what is this thing, the Metaverse? Is it even a thing? Most importantly, am I missing out on something big?

The chances are that if you ask 100 different people right now, “what is the Metaverse?”, you are going to hear something like 66 different answers. And, yet, you are still likely to not really know the answer.

Let’s unpack the Metaverse. Or try.

Forget what you already know

I remember over a decade ago trying to get my head around Twitter. (I know, it’s laughable today.) I sat there with my colleague as she tried patiently to explain how it worked. I just didn’t get it.

“So … you ‘follow’ people, anyone in the world, and you can write to them, and they back to you, but don’t need their email or anything?? And all of these messages are from people, but they are not writing to me?? And this octothorpe thing … # … is how I can send my message out to the entire world, not just who I am writing to …?”

The struggle I had back then was in trying to connect these new technologies and functions with what I knew from before. Normally, if you wanted to send someone a message, you did so by email or text message. So ... you just send a message “out there”? To anyone??

This “out there”, was an important concept – and a new one at the time – to get your head around. Even on Facebook, you wrote strictly to your friends (remember those days). Now, with Twitter, you were “micro-blogging” to the world. Beyond your real-world friendship circle.

To get your head around the Metaverse – the idea of it – a similar shift in mindset about how it’s different from before is what is required, as a starting point, to ‘get’ what the so-called Metaverse is. And isn’t.

So let’s step back for a moment.

A step-change in technology  

Take a look at the photo at the top of this article (put together by yours truly). Look at the image and answer the question: “What is a mobile phone?” (Or “cell phone” for readers who prefer American English.)

The first problem you are going to run into is the problem of definition.

What do you mean, “mobile”? I have it on good authority that people of a younger persuasion don’t say “mobile phone”, “cell” or “mobile”. Because it’s just a phone. What other kind is there?

Looking at the photo of the (mobile) phones again, the top-left phone is from 1995. Back then, it was obvious what a mobile phone was. And it was clear what you did with it. And not everyone who owned one in 1995 used it for sending messages – using a Short Message Service (SMS) for text.

The funky-looking phone, top right, came out in 2001. By now most phones could text, as well as play downloaded ringtones and display personalised screen pictures. And, of course, there was the fabulously delicious Nokia game, Snake (1997).

The top-of-the-line mobile phones by then had the capability to access a mobile version of the World Wide Web. (Hands up if you remember WAP!) Many now enabled basic email functionality, too.

OK, Granddad! Enough of the tech history lesson.

The point of bringing all this up is to illustrate the fact that the Internet did exist in 1995. And mobile phones existed in 1995. But two decades later, both technologies have changed fundamentally.

Talking about the future of “mobile telephony” and “what is the potential of the Internet” at the outset of these technologies in 1995 – or in any time period – is far from predictable.

What happened was that we got comfortable. We thought we knew what a mobile phone was. And then the iPhone dropped in 2007. Once the iPhone entered the stage, all of the technological concepts established in our minds … changed.

Conflicting visions of the Metaverse

There are countless ways to describe what “the Metaverse” is. But the difficult thing to do is to conceptualise it. The reason so many people struggle is that some are describing it in terms of a “smartphone”-stage of development (we are nowhere near it) while others are warning of the hysteria of the 2001 Dot-com boom and bust (think NFTs), saying it’s all over and all over-hyped.

This is where the confusion lies, with the conflicting definitions. When I failed to get my head around Twitter the first time I saw it, my confusion came from trying to compare it with what I thought I knew already. I hadn’t yet cottoned on to what it could be – and how this was different.

As it stands, the easiest way to conceptualise what the Metaverse is, today, is to instead think about where the Metaverse is, technologically. We are certainly beyond 1995; many of the vital components exist.

We have various combinations of kit (VR goggles and AR glasses), yet very much in rudimentary form. We also have new software associated with the Metaverse. Indeed, we have stacks of it (say hello to blockchains, NFTs, etc). These are built using wonderful new hardware, running on warp-speed computing power.  

And in these realms, people argue and debate. “No, it’s a metaverse, not the Metaverse.” “Which metaverse are you talking about?” “Do you mean Augmented Reality worlds or Virtual Reality worlds?” “The Metaverse is lame, the Omniverse is the future.” And on and on it goes.

This is where we are (seemingly) at.  

As with everything in life, things come and things go. The march of progress is unstoppable, but who would want to bring back the screech of dial-up internet? The answer is obvious. No one wants to go back to 2003.

Or do they?

The Metaverse: party like it’s 2003

So, here is yet another way of looking at the Metaverse; what it is and where it’s going. And, again, the timeline above is helpful.

You might have heard of something called Web3, Web 3 or Web 3.0 in recent Metaverse-related conversations. This is where it all begins to make sense. Before Web3.0, was Web 2.0. And before that Web 1.0.

OK, back to Granddad mode.

You see, the first phase of the internet (ca. 1990–2004) – which we now think of as Web version 1.0 – was only ever about technologies involving HTML, “homepages”, “surfing the Web”, “the Internet superhighway”, emails and read-only static web pages featuring text and images. While there was limited scope for video and audio via the Web, the revolution itself was genuinely amazing!

Then, around the early 2000s, came the next generation of the Internet. This was Web2.0. And it was even more amazing. But we didn’t (really) call it that. This was the era when we talked about things like, “multimedia”. “the social web”, “social media”, “blogging”, “mobile web”, “web apps”, “responsive websites”, “rich user experience”, “podcasts”, “Software as a Service (SaaS)”, etc. (Who is old now, then?)

With the Web 2.0 phase of Internet technology, came new ways to use, build and play with the Internet. While the phone world was shaken to the core by the iPhone in 2007, the Internet world had already begun to transform from around 2003 onwards.

Updated hardware allowed for high-speed Internet services, enabling streaming at high bandwidths. Suddenly, new things were possible that could not be done before. The world was about to change once more.

The Golden Age of the internet

In 2003, the five largest tech companies in the world by market cap were Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. These tech giants had held onto their hats while thousands of minnows got blown away in the Dot-com Bubble of 2000. Apple and Amazon also survived, but they were mere saplings next to the tech heavyweights.

The year 2003 also saw the founding of several notable technology companies: WordPress in May, Tesla in July and Skype in August. Also in 2003 came Second Life, which Wikipedia (2001) describes as “an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-player online virtual world”.

The Internet 2.0 trickle soon turned into a raging torrent, literally. It was the heydays of P2P and BitTorrent (notice the Bit- prefix!), founded in 2001.

The year Google went public, came a new website, The Facebook (2004). Then came a website for posting online-dating video profiles, called YouTube (2005). The following year came Twitter (2006), Spotify (2006) and Roblox (2006).

And then it was only now, the same year that DVD-rental company Netflix first started streaming movies, that the iPhone came along, and changed everything. Again.

This is when the mobile internet really took off. And apps. Together these two technologies single-handedly took what we thought of as “the Internet” in a whole new direction and possibility.

A whole lot more new start-ups and related technologies appeared in the following years: AirBnB (2008), Uber (2009), Bitcoin (2009), the Blockchain (2009), Instagram (2010), Twitch (2011), Minecraft (2011) and, yes, NFTs (2012). Facebook bought the Oculus headset maker in 2014, nearly a decade ago, and the first online immersive world Decentraland (2015) appeared soon after.

And why not mention a Chinese app called Douyin (2016), which merged with another app called Music.ly (2017) and later changed its name to TikTok.

So, are you confused? Why am I going through this history again?

Enter the Metaverse

Nowadays it is safe to say that what we all do “online” and the meaning of “what the Internet is” differs for each of us. For some, the online world is a place to do business. For others, to meet people. There are good things on there, but also lots of bad. Some go there to learn, others to escape. It’s not the real world (so-called “meat space”) but it’s very much real.

With all this long-winded history and nostalgia in mind, let’s revisit the question: what is the Metaverse?

Answer: a place to do business. For others, to meet people. There are good things on there, but also lots of bad. Some go there to learn, others to escape. It’s not the real world but it’s very much real. Oh, and it’s often experienced in 3D (using sound, sight, imagination and touch) rather than 2D.

Just as the Web went from 1.0 to 2.0, whole new digital tools and dimensions opened up. The world was reorganised and reconnected in ways never before possible. This time we have entered the dawn of the next phase, Web 3.0. It's the new "out there", the new phase in a new realm or dimension.

On a comparative timeline of technology, this is where we currently are once again. 2003. There are things, possibilities, businesses, worlds and opportunities just over the horizon that we can hardly imagine what they will be.

The truth is that no one knows exactly what the Metaverse will be. But that’s what makes it SO exciting! THAT is why people are buzzing about it. And THAT is where the Metaverse is heading. Who wouldn’t like to be an entrepreneur or investor in 2003 all over again!?

This is the second article in a newsletter dedicated to musings, insights, observations and pondering about the putative Metaverse. Subscribe for future articles and interviews by the author.

Jesse Karjalainen is a communication and content specialist, as well as an award-winning journalist, author, writer, photographer, designer and illustrator. He lives in Sweden and is the author of ‘Sisu: Resilience Belonging Purpose - The Secrets of Finland's can-do mindset’.

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