Revisiting the Concept of Digitalization
Take a step back and revisit the present Metaverse. DIGITALIZATION.
Before starting the read, take a moment of thought about the Metaverse. What does this concept mean to us? What do we imagine regarding this? Are we still there yet? If you’re finished and done organizing your thoughts, come follow along.
We define the Metaverse as a digital copy of our physical world, amplifying reality’s capabilities or surpassing its limits — a place where anything is possible with the technology’s allowance.
When illustrating the Metaverse, it is more likely to visualize a virtual world with actively interacting digital avatars and objects; a physical world with augmenting figures and information being displayed. Or, for someone, it may be an entirely new, interesting topic of discovery. All in all, it’s interpreted as a newly rising trend in the technology sector, which everyone is veritably excited about the upcoming opportunities.
Yes, this is somehow right. But here’s a fact. The Metaverse is not a state-of-the-art concept; it has already existed since 1993. I’ll elaborate more on the reason for being so specific on this. The point is that we are already living in a world where the Metaverse is so deeply integrated and interconnected to our lives so that it is nearly challenging to realize its impact on it.
The brief illustration above is about the future of the Metaverse we anticipate creating and experiencing. A several of my previous articles have elaborated on how this future is being shaped. But I believe we should also take a step back and revisit the present Metaverse: the early phase. Here we will revisit the concept of digitalization.
Returning to the fundamental definition of the Metaverse, it is a digital copy of the physical world, with promising possibilities that surpass reality. And there already is — the World Wide Web, introduced to the public in 1993.
The internet was mainly text-based at the very beginning. Bluntly, it only welcomed tech-savvy people and professionals who were really into kinds of stuff like this. However, thanks to the World Wide Web, invented by Sir Tim Berners Lee, the general public gained easier access to the internet. It enabled the distribution of information to be handier, founding the cornerstone of social networking and content sharing.
GeoCities, a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free, was one of the most popular websites during the early era of the internet. It was like the precursor of social media, where people created social platforms based on common interests and hosted personal websites and blogs. It was entirely a free platform, with no restrictions, no centralization, no censorship, and was entirely separate from the physical world. These characteristics gave people a reason to stay on the internet, as it gave a new sensation of creating and exploring their own world.
Then, unfortunately, as time passed by, the government and the economy interrupted the free internet, made it to be more centralized and a new means of monetization. However, due to this, the internet became more integrated with the physical world, creating more development opportunities.
That was a brief introduction to the foundation and evolution of the internet. An important point to notice on the history of the internet is how things got translated into the online world: how the concepts in the physical world got digitalized on the internet. The structure and logic of everything on the internet imitate the physical world. And what persists on the internet for a long time are the ones that digitalized the most fundamentals of human life in reality.
Beginning with websites, the very cornerstone of the internet. Relying on memory for information has a high level of uncertainty. Human memories are short-lived, easy to be manipulated, and is unable to prove their validity. Then, people started recording and storing information. This ultimately reached the creation of numerous means of information collection, including documentation, voice, and video recording.
When things are created, a place to store them in an organized manner is demanded. In the physical world, documents, audios, and videos are stored in their efficient, desired format; labeled and put in storage. Documents in files or in the format of books, audios and videos in tapes or CD/DVDs. Then these are labeled and organized; kept in a library or a vault.
Every recording — data — is labeled and stored; accessed easily whenever needed. Then here’s a question: how can information be kept online, in the digital world? The answer is simple, create a digital library where people can access writings, audio, and videos. And that’s what a website is.
Website structures use labeling and storing methods of the real world. When you search for a book in the library, you first go to the area where books of a certain genre are labeled alphabetically and shelved. Then, you search the selection of books whose title starts with a certain letter. Different labeling methods may apply, but the logic is similar overall.
When I search for Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, I first visit the sections where books with the topic Future or Philosophy are grouped. Next, I search in the collection of books starting with the character H.
Similarly, websites have root and subdirectories. There’s the main page of a website, and different topics can be accessed via the subdirectories of a website.
Say you access a media platform — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc. When you enter the website, the main page displaying important daily headlines is shown. If you want to read news articles specific to your topic of interest, you access one of the topic columns. Click on Tech, and here you can access all the news related to technology.
Websites are inspired by the structure of libraries in the real world, but that’s not the end of its core concept. When something is digitalized online, there are always more advanced features supplemented on it. For the instance of websites, the most significant aspect is the reduction of time taken for the search of information.
When accessing the library or other places where information is stored, you have to search for what you are looking for manually. Even if there are tools, guides, and human resources for assistance, it still takes time to search for categories and items; manually scan them. This is time-consuming.
While on websites, you can search for what you want; the result will appear immediately after pressing the search button. Even if websites do not have an integrated search utility, web browsers nowadays have a default search function for a wanted keyword or sentence.
Compare the time taken for searching information offline on a library relative to the time taken for searching online on a website after typing a few words and clicking just a few buttons. You will unconsciously know why websites are better than libraries in most aspects, even if they share the same structure and functionality.
Now out of the scope of digitalization of information storage and access, we’ll take a deep dive into the digitalization of humans’ personal and social perspective — but more on that in the next article.
