Imagining a World We Don’t Know
“A vision of the future ideated by a creative agency for a megacorporation was always going to be dreadful. Today it feels possible…to invent completely new aesthetics — so long as someone takes the reins from the technologists.” (NY Times)
Culture Mapping Methodology: We use applied semiotics and cultural anthropology to understand how meaning is changing. This report applies the method to understanding the evolving story of the metaverse, framing the words and trends we are seeing into meaning spaces. These meaning spaces reveal a critical tension between the world as we know it and what comes next. Who will effectively build the virtual space? Who will exploit it? How are we unknowingly entering? Archetyping can help us see where human engagement with the metaverse currently resides and where it is likely to move toward. Purchase the full 49-page report here.
Mapping the Metaverse as a Story System
To read changes in culture early, we analyze words and visuals as clusters of distinct societal traits and behaviors that indicate patterns of social change. Linguistic signifiers reveal such codes of behavior and inform archetypal narratives.
As we move through the Pandemic, we need to see patterns through an archetypal lens. That lens reveals a pattern of trajectory. Behavioral clusters inform each other as the metaverse truly comes into its own.
We pooled a sampling of commonly used words within the metaverse discourse. We mapped them to see related trends in context and to better understand how people are engaging them.
