Meta Platforms and the Metaverse: A Capitalist, Temporal Culmination
Channel: Fairfield University
Date: 20/05/2022

A Conversation with Jack Martorano

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in October of 2021, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would undergo a rebranding to “Meta.” Zuckerberg’s announcement revealed both a rebranding of Facebook and aspirations for an all-encompassing virtual reality conceived as a meta-platform. This project asks what Facebook’s discourse about the metaverse indicates about the evolution of platforms in relation to political economy and their impact on social time. Scholars have argued that the rise of platforms has coincided with a new stage of capitalism described as “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2016) or “surveillance capitalism,” (Zuboff, 2019) and that platforms have blended labor and leisure time (Faucher, 2018). This project analyzes Facebook and Zuckerberg’s public discourse around Meta and argues that this rebranding represents the culmination of multiple larger phenomena, including the political and economic conditions, at work since the later part of the 20th century. This project also explores social media platforms and the metaverse’s potential impact on the transformation of human experience as it relates to the broader construct of time.

For more information about Fairfield check out:

+ http://www.fairfield.edu
+ http://www.fairfieldstags.com

Make sure to follow us on social media:

Instagram | http://www.instagram.com/fairfieldu
Twitter | http://www.twitter.com/fairfieldu
Facebook | http://www.facebook.com/FairfieldUniversity
Snapchat | fairfieldu


© Fairfield University 2022