Both Dystopian And Utopian Visions Of The Metaverse Are A LOOONG Way From Realization...,

technologyreview |  The first person to write about the “metaverse” was Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but the concept of alternative electronic realms, including the “cyberspace” of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, was already well established.

In contrast to what we typically think of as the internet, a metaverse is a 3D immersive environment shared by multiple users, in which you can interact with others via avatars. A metaverse can, with the support of the right technology, feel like real life, with all the usual elements of work, play, trade, friendship, love—a world of its own.

Perhaps the best-known prototype metaverse is the online virtual world Second Life, whose very name implies an alternate existence. Other games might also be said to be metaverses in their own right: World of Warcraft, Everquest, Fortnite, Animal Crossing. Each of these offers its own version of an immersive world, although they don’t quite have the ability to completely take over your senses. Most users experience these games from the outside looking in: screens front and center, with speakers on the sides. Actions are mediated by a keyboard, mouse, trackpad, or game controller instead of players’ hands and feet.

Technology is starting to change that. High-density screens, virtual-­reality goggles and glasses, surround sound, and spatial audio are putting more genuinely immersive experiences within reach. Cameras are gaining 3D capabilities, and single microphones are giving way to microphone arrays that capture sound with better depth and position. Augmented reality, which overlays virtual objects onto a video feed of the real world, provides a bridge between purely virtual and analog or real experiences. There is progress toward adding a sense of touch, too, in the form of multi­touch screens, haptic technologies, control gloves, and other wearables. Wraparound environments like Industrial Light and Magic’s Stagecraft are within reach only to certain industries for now but may see wider use as technology follows the typical curve of adoption and commoditization.

Amanda Gorman - And Her Work - Are Barely Average...,

thehindu  |  Gorman’s text was also presented and read, and acclaimed, as a poem. That is where the trouble starts. Is there a major difference between people who acclaim a political leader despite his bad policies because they agree with his (good or bad) views, and people who acclaim a weak poem because they agree with the poet’s (good) views? This controversy erupted on Twitter, and it ended with the unasked question: If we lower the standards of policy or poetry for a person, adducing age, sex, colour or correct opinion as an excuse, then are we doing any favour to the person or the cause?

The question assumes significance due to various attempts to ‘defend’ Gorman’s poem by bringing up the different traditions of Black poetry. If Gorman’s poem is an expression of this tradition at its best, then it’s a good defence. If not, then, to my mind, it does gross injustice to both Gorman as a person, and to Black poetry. The white women who posted on Twitter about Gorman’s elegance and poise seem to me to be indulging in a kind of well-meaning racism: it is a version of the racism that makes coloured people take care to appear well-dressed, refined, suave. That is not what is required of a poem.

Does Gorman’s poem match up to the high standards of the best Anglophone poetry by Black poets? You need not compare her efforts to works like Derek Walcott’s Omeros, for that might be considered too literary an example. Let us compare it to shorter poems that, to my mind, are among the great poems of the English language today. Note, I say the English language, not Black poetry.

This is how Gorman’s poem starts: “When day comes we ask ourselves,/ where can we find light in this never-ending shade?/ The loss we carry,/ a sea we must wade/ We’ve braved the belly of the beast/ We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.” It is a decent start — for a student’s poem. It is full of standard clichés, none of them redeemed by any twist of phrase or idea. One does not want to be a grammarian and point out that ‘shade’ is not just a cliché, but an inappropriate one, for it can convey repose and rest in sunny climates, such as the American South, and not necessarily ‘night.’ Such problems crop up throughout the poem — as they do in any poem by a talented student. An accomplished poet learns to go beyond them. It is not that clichés cannot be used; it’s how you use them.

Stop Pretending That The Inaugural Poem Was Anything But Awful

TAC |  What I found upon this search was, and is, nothing less than an embarrassment to our country. A caricature of a parody, unworthy of the name of poetry, rising not even to the level of propaganda.

But what made it so bad?

First of all, its emptiness. Its platitudes. The fact that, if presented in prose form and unburdened of its opportunistic rhymes, it might be mistaken for a New York Times op-ed. There appears to be a belief among slam poets that this quasi-rap, pseudo-freestyle, lilting rhythm in which the poems are performed (which spans the entire genre without alteration) is an acceptable substitute for substance. That vacuous wordplay fills the shoes of wit. “What just is,” the poet explains in the opening stanza, “isn’t always justice.” The phrase, of course, means nothing. But because the punniness is clever (is it even that?), it passes muster, and ascends to the level of great, praiseworthy artistic achievement in the eyes of our elites.

Gorman’s poem also seems to lift a line, practically verbatim except to include a rhyme, from the recent Broadway hit “Hamilton.” What’s more, that line (“Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid”) is itself a reference to George Washington’s Farewell Address, which is itself a reference to Scripture (Micah 4:4, Kings 4:25, Zechariah 3:10). The irony of the fact that, at an inaugural recitation for the oldest ever American president, more advanced in years than all his living predecessors, reference is made to our first president’s Farewell Address, in which he wistfully anticipates his restful retirement, is too much to bear. In fact, it demonstrates the poet’s unfamiliarity with her material, and thus smacks more of plagiarism than of reverential reference (although I’m sure she reveres Lin-Manuel Miranda very much).

Relatedly, the poem displays a perverse kind of Burkeanism. A contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn is similarly imagined as the basis of our social project: “Because being American is more than a pride we inherit; it’s the past we step into and how we repair it”; “We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation, because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.” But instead of the benevolent passage of the torch from the old to the young, this poem imagines the promise of that contract to be the severance of ourselves from our collective past, either by the forward march of progress or, if that fails, by the revision of the historical narrative itself.

This actually bodes very well for conservatives in the long run. As a member of the same generation as Ms. Gorman, I can say that this poem truly embodies the Millennial and Gen-Z left. That cunning rhetoric, no matter how sophistic, is all it takes to convince. That their sense of an artistic—or any—tradition stretches back only as far as their memory of the latest trends in the pop anti-culture. And that their political mission amounts, simply, to a total dissociation from and dissolution of the bonds of our national past. That mission, like Gorman’s poem, is as self-defeating as it is empty.