On Oct. 28, 2021 Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company Facebook will be officially changing their name to Meta. As of now, the brand is most known for their social media applications such as Facebook itself, Instagram and What’s App. Moving forward, Facebook will move from being the parent company to being an extension of Meta. Facebook will also be changing their ticker from FB to MVRS in the stock market.

The main purpose behind the rebrand is to help shift the focus of the company. Instead of focusing their efforts on social media, Meta will encompass both social media and the “metaverse.” The “metaverse” refers to a concept created by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Meta (formerly known as Facebook), that has the intention of creating a whole new universe that users will interact and use on a daily basis.

“Your devices won’t be the focal point of your attention anymore,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re starting to see a lot of these technologies coming together in the next five or 10 years. A lot of this is going to be mainstream and a lot of us will be creating and inhabiting worlds that are just as detailed and convincing as this one, on a daily basis.”

Meta’s name can be translated from Greek into the word “beyond,” referring to how Meta the company wants to take technology ahead of what is now. While there is no such thing as a “”metaverse”: yet, Zuckerberg has plans to take society farther away from using cell phones and towards interacting with each other using virtual reality technology.

Zuckerberg said, “We believe the “metaverse” will be the successor to the mobile internet.”

So far, Meta has revealed in a teaser plans for workplace, gaming and social concepts into the “metaverse”. The company has revealed a series of concept videos that simulate a broad array of topics that include the concept of playing immersive games with your friends, attending a concert and even being a part of meetings from a remote location.

“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the “metaverse” is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started,” Zuckerberg said.

The “metaverse” will also include a new form of virtual marketplace through taking Messenger, another app owned by Meta, and moving it to VR. Users will hypothetically have the ability to go through a new home screen in Oculus Quest to make games in VR more social as well as allowing developers to start selling their own virtual goods.

“I know that some people will say that this isn’t a time to focus on the future, and I want to acknowledge that there are important issues to work on in the present. There always will be,” Zuckerberg said. “So for many people, I’m just not sure there ever will be a good time to focus on the future. But I also know that there are a lot of you who feel the same way that I do.”

While the shift to the name Meta can be seen as an exciting announcement made by Facebook as they try to shift to different things, many speculators on the internet believe that this is Facebook’s way of diverting attention away from their recent controversies.

This past month, a whistle blower with the name of Frances Haugen called the company out for being aware of the harmful effects of their social media applications without doing anything. The Facebook Papers, formerly known as the Facebook Files, showcase how Facebook has been proven to be the center of bad decision making, online civil wars as well as misinformation. Zuckerberg has denied these allegations and Facebook’s spokesman Aaron Simpson released an emailed statement regarding misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine

“There’s no silver bullet to fighting misinformation, which is why we take a comprehensive approach which includes removing more than 20 million pieces of content that break our covid misinformation policies,” says Simpson. “[C]onnecting more than 2 billion people to reliable information about covid-19 and vaccines, and partnering with independent fact-checkers,”

A recent poll done by the McIntosh Trail revealed that 93% of our viewers will not be using the new name Meta, while the remaining 7% will be using the new name.

In regards to the “metaverse”, senior Maritza Gomez said, “I don’t think we’re ready for that.”

Sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/facebook-changes-company-name-to-meta.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/28/tech/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-keynote-announcements/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/facebook-covid-misinformation/