A survey by nextMedia.Hamburg shows that around 15% of respondents are afraid of parallel digital worlds. The youngest are even more afraid of it (35.3%).
Expert David Mattin of New World Same Humans warns: “We are only at the beginning of this journey and we should not think that the Metaverse is just hype.”
Blockchain, NFTs and the Metaverse caused a stir in the media world in 2021. But the new survey showed that very few people know what these technologies are.
The results clearly show that it sometimes takes a long time for new technologies to reach the general public. The majority (69.4%) of respondents said they were not familiar enough with the technologies mentioned to explain them to a friend. Of the technologies respondents feel familiar with, more established terms such as VR headsets (21.1%) and augmented reality (16.1%) are clearly at the top. On the other hand, the more recent the terms, the less they are known to respondents. Only 5.2% of respondents say they know what the metaverse is, and only 5.6% know about NFTs.
Confidence in parallel digital worlds is low: while 39.6% of respondents say they don’t know about the metaverse, 16.1% are afraid of it and very few would like to participate in it themselves: 2.8%. 41.9% of respondents are unable to make statements about the metaverse.
Young people are more familiar with new technologies and have polarized attitudes
The younger the respondents, the more they know about new technologies: around 50% of 18-29 year olds say they do not know any of the terms mentioned. In contrast, their attitudes towards them are more polarized. In the same group, 12.7% said they liked participating in the metaverse, while 35.3% said that a parallel digital world scared them. Both response options received less and less agreement as respondents’ ages increased.
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New technologies must do one thing: serve human needs
The survey results show that while the technology and content industries see the future in technologies such as blockchain, NFTs and the metaverse, all companies operating in this space must remain focused on the needs of their users* if they want to succeed. “The content industry has long known the importance of communities. But now it has to think about how to create communities within virtual worlds,” says David Mattin, author of the New World Same Humans tech newsletter, during this year’s nextMedia.Hamburg Trends Report. “A hybrid internet changes so much in terms of socializing, entertainment and working. The key is to ask: how can we use the new virtual world to satisfy the deepest human needs? »
www.nextmedia-hamburg.de