[Commlist] CFP: Welcome to the Metaverse! (again?)

Baltic Screen Media Review invites colleagues to learn about our most 
recent special issue dedicated to the videogame Disco Elysium. Please 
find it here: https://sciendo.com/issue/BSMR/9/1

We would also like to announce a new Call For Papers for a special issue 
titled "Welcome to the Metaverse! (again?)”.

Now that ‘cyberspace’ has been conquered and with ‘Web 2.0’ in our 
rearview mirror, the ‘metaverse’ is currently being rapidly adopted by 
the consultant class and industry professionals as the next big thing. 
Once again the future of the Internet is captured in a buzzword that is 
equally revered and critiqued as it is misunderstood (van Dijck & 
Nieborg, 2009). Because of the large capital reserves of investors and 
big tech companies, there is a widespread sense of urgency not to miss 
the boat. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard and Facebook’s 
rebranding to Meta show that platform companies are deeply committed and 
the stakes are increasing.
Among internet scholars, the current wave of enthusiasm is met with 
wariness. After all, the metaverse, both as a concept and an imaginary, 
has a history that far predates the founding of Facebook. Virtual worlds 
have long served as spaces for play, communications (e.g., social, 
marketing, work), entertainment, entrepreneurship, (monetary) 
transactions, and so forth (van der Graaf, 2018). For example, in 2006 
Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) made global headlines with journalists 
widely deploying the notion of the metaverse - hyped as the next big 
thing - in that exactly the combination of those features was considered 
a dramatic departure from what was common in the larger (3D) games and 
in the digital platform industry at that time. Many iterations, shapes 
and forms of the metaverse have followed since.

The current re-actualisation of the metaverse concept can be linked to a 
wide variety of concepts, imaginaries, and technologies that include VR 
and AR, 5G mobile connectivity, NFTs, the Internet-of-Things, Web3, 
blockchain and other digital ledger technologies, game engines, etc. 
Their collective development is both driven by urban innovation such as 
‘smart cities’ or ‘digital twins’, cultural practices such as transmedia 
storytelling and augmented reality gaming, and a widespread solutionist 
attitude amongst technology investors and entrepreneurs. Against this 
background the metaverse is widely understood to be the next iteration 
of the Internet; one that is not only mobile but also spatial, enabling 
connectivity across physical places and virtual spaces. Utopian 
discourses emanating from developer conferences and interviews with CEOs 
understand blockchain technologies to allow for a radical 
democratization of access, decentralization of power, and more equal 
ownership of digital assets. Such lofty ideals fly squarely in the face 
of the centralized ownership model of the platform economy where 
resources are (made) scarce and power hierarchies among users are 
notably asymmetric (van Dijck et al., 2019).

That said, the metaverse is in an important state of interpretive flux 
which leaves space for a radical reimagining of the governance of 
metaverse spaces. This raises the question: do blockchain models and 
platform business models allow for such a reimagining? What is the 
division of power between, on the one hand, Meta, Microsoft and Epic, 
versus blockchain-based protocols such as Sandbox, Decentraland, NetVrk 
or Pavia? Are there modes of community organization and collaboration 
that provide viable alternatives to centralized platform-driven models 
of the emerging spatial internet? And, how do the interests of 
governments and infrastructure companies – telecommunications firms, 
developers of game engines, hardware manufacturers – play a role in this 
political economy?

With this special issue, we invite contributions that analyze, critique 
and/or conceptualize the structural conditions that underlie the 
metaverse. Such contributions may include past, present, or future uses 
of metaverse technologies for communication, transactions, or artistic 
practices such as filmmaking. Relatedly, we welcome contributions that 
survey convergent processes of audiovisual storytelling, digital play, 
and other creative practices. We invite also discussions on methods for 
researching the metaverse worlds, the cultural practices of their 
development and use, perhaps by using evolving approaches such as 
cultural data analytics (Manovich, 2020; Ibrus et al., 2021). Lastly, 
contributions that challenge the metaverse concept – or related 
imaginaries and applications – are encouraged.

Possible paper topics may include:

- Critical histories of the metaverse (and related) concepts, including 
histories of VR, AR, and XR technologies
- The metaverse as an imaginary
- The political economy of the metaverse and its position in the 
platform economy
- The role of constitutive technologies such as blockchain protocols and 
game engines vis-a-vis metaverse development - Labor relations in the 
metaverse
- The physical, spatial and material dimensions of the metaverse (e.g. 
smart cities) - The infrastructural dimension of the metaverse (e.g., 
the role of telecoms, 5G networks and ‘Internet of Things’ - Emerging 
creative practices (e.g., storytelling, virtual design, etc.)

Key dates: 14.03.2022 - deadline for abstracts
31.03.2022 - decisions on abstracts sent out
31.05.2022 - deadline for articles
15.12.2022 - issue publication

In this volume of BSMR, we will accept long research articles (4000 – 
8000 words w/o ref) and short perspective papers/commentaries (2000 – 
4000 words w/o ref).

When publishing, no payment from the authors will be required.

The editors of the theme volume are Shenja van der Graaf (University of 
Twente), Indrek Ibrus (Tallinn University) and David Nieborg (University 
of Toronto). All submissions should be sent via email attachment to 
Indrek Ibrus ((ibrus /at/ tlu.ee)).

Baltic Screen Media Review is free to publish open access peer-reviewed 
academic journal dedicated to audiovisual arts and media. The journal 
was launched in 2013 and is published by Tallinn University Baltic Film, 
Media and Arts School. Its core mission is to publish original and 
critical research articles on a variety of screen media forms and 
phenomena. This issue of BSMR will appear as Volume 10:2, published both 
online and in print in late 2021. BSMR embraces visual storytelling, we 
thus invite authors to use photos and other illustrations as part of 
their contributions.

Further info about the journal can be found at 
https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/bsmr/bsmr-overview.xml?language=en

References
- John David N. Dionisio, William G. Burns III, and Richard Gilbert. 
2013. 3D Virtual worlds and the metaverse: Current status and future 
possibilities. ACM Comput. Surv. 45, 3, Article 34 (June 2013), 38 
pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2480741.2480751 - van der Graaf, S. 
ComMODify! Mod Development at the Crossroads of Commerce and Community 
(2018). Palgrave Macmillan.
- Ning, H. Wang, W., Lin, Y., Wang, W., Dhelim, S., Farha, F., Ding, J., 
Daneshmand, M. (2011). A Survey on Metaverse: the State-of-the-art, 
Technologies, Applications, and Challenges. Computers and Society (IF), 
arXiv:2111.09673v1 - Lik-Hang Lee, Zijun Lin, Rui Hu, Zhengya Gong, 
Abhishek Kumar, Tangyao Li, Sijia Li, and Pan Hui. 2021. When Creators 
Meet the Metaverse: A Survey on Computational Arts. ACM Comput. Surv. 
37, 4, Article 111 (December 2021), 36 pages. 
https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456 - López-Díez, J. (2021). 
Metaverse: Year One. Mark Zuckerberg’s Video Keynote on Meta (October 
2021) in the Context of Previous and Prospective Studies on Metaverses. 
Pensar la publicidad 15(2), 299-303.
- Stephenson, Neil. (1992). Snow Crash. Bantam Books.
- van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. B. (2009). Wikinomics and its 
discontents: A critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. New 
Media & Society, 11(5), 855–874.
- Van Dijck, J., Nieborg, D. B., & Poell, T. (2019). Reframing platform 
power. Internet Policy Review, 8(2). 
https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/reframing-platform-power
- Manovich, Lev. 2020. Cultural Analytics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT 
Press.
- Ibrus, Indrek, Maximilian Schich, and Marek Tamm. 2021. "Cultural 
Science Meets Cultural Data Analytics." Cultural Science Journal 13 (1). 
https://doi.org/10.2478/csj-2021-0001

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