Metaverse Datafication: Technologies, Definitions, and Futures

This book explores the most pressing questions and concerns that are emerging in tandem with the development of metaverse platforms and technologies. It focuses on the central question of how the gallop towards ‘bigger’ and ‘richer’ data will extend and intensify current drives towards datafication and commodification.

The volume draws on different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including science and technology studies, critical data studies, communication, and media studies, and cultural studies as well as philosophy and political science to offer a range of complementary perspectives. The essays combine conceptual reflection on as well as empirical engagement with the topic of metaverse datafication and its political, infrastructural, and social implications. Key focal points include analysis of the corporate narratives that drive the current development of metaverse platforms and technologies, the computational infrastructures and material resources that enable metaverse technologies, the reconfiguration or even subversion of state power, global markets, and regulatory frameworks, the impact of metaverse practices and data on social life and personal identity, and the role that these developments play for academic research and our conceptualisation of knowledge.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

Chris Hesselbein is an Assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Department of Management Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is an ethnographer who studies how knowledge and technology are co-constructed with conceptions of social order.

Paolo Bory is an Assistant professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He studies from a social and historical perspectives the imaginaries and narratives about networks and digital technologies such as AI and supercomputing.

Stefano Canali is an Assistant professor of Philosophy of Science in the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His research focuses on the epistemic role of emerging technologies in science and their connections with evidence-based policy, scientific change, and the science-society interface.