The CEO of Facebook renames his creation: Meta is born, in the name of that metaverse that describes the universe of tomorrow. Social media will not ignore virtuality, which will be our new way of being in the world. A new logo tells this scenario very well
Rethinking a brand, realigning form and content on the basis of a new planning and a new identity narrative. Not an easy challenge. For Mark Zuckerberg, a necessary step. Last October 28, the former Harvard boy prodigy, inventor of the largest social network ever, officially presented Meta , the updated version of the historic holding company Facebook Inc., founded in 2004, which quickly rose to the top of the social Olympus media, which has expanded over the years with the acquisition of new services and leading platforms, and has now been rethought as part of a relaunch and repositioning project on the global market. The large joint-stock company, thus renamed, will continue to control Facebook , Instagram and Whatsapp – which will not undergo changes, at least for the moment – as well as developing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets .
Snow Crash
FROM CYBERPUNK LITERATURE TO THE NEW INTERNET
The name chosen has a short and austere sound, which comes from ancient Greek, and which however smacks of avant-garde, of hyper-technological scenarios, of dystopian landscapes: it is inspired by the concept of “metaverse” which appeared for the first time in 1992 between the pages of “Snow Crash”, a science fiction novel by the American Neal Stephenson . Here the idea of a virtuality inhabited by avatars and holograms takes shape, in which the meaning of things, events and social relationships is refounded thanks to the power of an evolved Internet: ” The electronic mirrors placed inside the car make the beam back and forth across the lenses of Hiro’s goggles, just as an electron beam inside a television colors the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image remains suspended in the space between Hiro and Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each of the eyes you can create a three-dimensional effect. (…) So, Hiro is not where he is at all, but in a computer-generated universe that the machine is marking on his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In industry jargon, this imaginary place is called the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. He helps him forget the shitty life of the container ”.
RETHINKING A SYMBOL, BETWEEN FORM AND CONTENT
And if the “naming” work focused on this interesting convergence between the simplicity of a classical prefix, which for the ancient Greeks indicated what lies “beyond”, “beyond”, the graphic line appears consistent with the substance, thanks to a timely semiotic study. The chosen pictogram describes the mathematical sign of infinity, distorted by an irregular perspective: probably the metaphorical representation of a world redesigned by a different idea of space-time, beyond the habits and limits of reality. A “metaverse”, to use that thirty-year-old term, but which still has the flavor of a compelling near future. Effective in its graphic synthesis and universal meaning, that inverted 8 also resembles the M of Meta subject to a force of traction and change: a process of meta-morphosis , precisely, if it is true that technology is the engine of a radical and exponential transformation of our existences, but also the reservoir from which new, powerful mythologies emerge. A beautiful game, therefore, between lettering, mathematical references and literary evocations.
As for colour, blue maintains a strong connection with the Facebook logo, but also recalls the concept of infinity, while from an aesthetic point of view it falls within the range of that pale palette, no longer bright or fluorescent, on which the designers they are betting today. And so it is for soft, rounded, elastic shapes, another trend in current graphics, exactly like the minimalist vocation that has been all the rage lately. Just think of the new Airbnb logo , which was much talked about due to its alleged similarities with sexual organs: the simple, sinuous, polysemantic A (which contained various meanings, from an upside-down heart to the geolocation symbol), turned red mild, from the point of view of formalization it is easily assimilable to Zuckerberg’s new creation. Same direction, and it is just another example among many, for the car manufacturer Kia , which has just modernized its logo, abandoning the original frame and drying the image: the three letters of the brand remain, bent, distorted, close together and subjected to a driving force, which transforms them into a fluid object.
BEYOND THE SCANDALS
And in the meantime Mark Zuckerberg, engaged in these restyling operations, is trying to make us forget the umpteenth controversy that has engulfed the oldest of the social networks, that Facebook which has become an indispensable tool for personal and professional sharing, slowly weakened by a certain tiredness, run by other more incisive and immediate channels, and penalized on several occasions by serious scandals, on the topics of cyber security, fake news, social toxicity and moral integrity: from the thorny case of Cambridge Analytics in 2018 to the recent investigation into ” Facebook Papers”, 10 thousand pages of compromising internal documents, stolen by a former employee of the company.
Oculus Rift headsets
THE FUTURE IS A HOLOGRAM
New name, therefore, but also a new ambitious project, to recover energy and adequate propulsion. It would be simplistic to continue to call by the name of good old Facebook a large group which encompasses multiple entrepreneurial realities and which above all has already chosen which future to imagine and which tools to use to make it possible. A future described as immersive, an embodied internet that is the projection of an immaterial, volatile, yet infinitely possible world. In short, virtual reality will be, in the web of tomorrow, ordinary administration and a natural extension of itself: there will be a day – within about ten years, predicts the head of the US giant – in which it will be normal to ” teleport yourself instantly as a hologram to be in the office without commuting, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room ”.
Thus, while an army of specific professionals – the “creators” of tomorrow – will work to produce apps, games, objects and services tailored to the Metaverse, a combination of hardware (Oculus viewers) and software will revolutionize everyday life. And the Facebook group aims to be, once again, at the head of this epochal change.
