“Get your skates on!” I sometimes hear, especially from harassed parents trying to speed up apathetic children. I can’t call communication rights advocates apathetic, but we should feel pushed to move faster and harder in response to rapid digital technology developments. It is, of course, fair to...
Two contemporary “utopias” come under communication rights scrutiny in the latest Media Development, WACC’s quarterly journal. The issue “Utopia or Bust: In Search of Inclusion” examines the Metaverse, which seeks to combine multiple sources of information on one digital platform, and Latin America’s Pink Tide 2.0,...
[caption id="attachment_51407" align="alignleft" width="190"] MD 2023/1[/caption] Media Development 2023-1 Utopia or Bust: In Search of Inclusion Two “utopias” are examined in this issue: the potential impact on communication policies of Latin America’s Pink Tide 2.0 – the resurgence of a turn towards left-wing governments in Latin American democracies...
The term “Metaverse” was first used in Neil Stevenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it is described as a three-dimensional world accessed using goggles, similar to today’s VR headsets. In the novel, Hiro Protagonist, a computer hacker and pizza delivery guy, moves in and out of...
Gian M. Volpicelli From Microsoft to Meta, the race is on to sell an amorphous concept that no one really wants them to build. The race is on to cash in on the metaverse hype. Last week, Microsoft described its $68.7 billion takeover of gaming studio Activision Blizzard...
Philip Lee Like all digital technologies, the Metaverse ought to be a public good and, therefore, of direct benefit to society. A system that interweaves multiple sources of information across different platforms should be useful, affordable, accessible, and egalitarian. Yet the history of communication technologies demonstrates that...