Defining the Metaverse through the lens of academic scholarship, news articles, and social media

Recommended citation: Nathan Green and Karen Works. 2022. Defining the Metaverse through the lens of academic scholarship, news articles, and social media. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D 22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 10, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3564533.3564571
Download Paper

Neologisms are recently-coined words most often associated with the development of new methodologies and technology . The domain of neologisms includes Scientific Discoveries and Inventions, Technological, Political, and Pop-culture. A recent neologism is “Metaverse”. The first usage of Metaverse was in the Pop-culture domain via Neil Stevenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash, where it was used to describe a virtual retreat location for players bogged down by their lives. Metaverse was later used to describe online universes available via VR. In this paper, we explore the contextual differences in the us- age of “Metaverse” across different domains. ACM publications were used to investigate the Scientific Discoveries and Inventions Tech- nological domain usage of Metaverse. While news media reports and discussions on social media were used to explore the political and pop-culture domain usage of Metaverse. Studying this will give us a glimpse into the “intellect and thinking, scientific, historical and cultural” developments generated by the neologism “Metaverse”. This research aims to automatically extract topics from multi- ple domains which discuss the Metaverse. We examine academic papers, social media forums, and the news media on the subject. Through the extraction of topics, keywords, and frequencies, we aim to discover the commonalities in how different mediums define the Metaverse. Additionally, we discuss how they differ in the focus in their discussion.