Reimagining the inevitable: how metaverse imaginaries construct understandings of privacy and surveillance

Abstract

Previous research on consumer privacy has heavily emphasised an individualistic perspective, focusing on protection against individual harm and the importance of privacy self-management. In today’s data-driven society, understanding the collective nature of privacy and its connections with increasing surveillance and larger societal harms is important. By employing media analysis of textual data, we explore how sociotechnical imaginaries of the metaverse constitute perceptions of surveillance and privacy. The findings identify four rhetorics that underpin metaverse imaginaries, with some reinforcing the prevailing surveillance ideology (inevitability and technological solutionism) and some challenging it (decentralisation and collaboration). This article contributes to the privacy literature in consumer research by illuminating how privacy is given sociocultural meaning as part of the surveillance ideology and by extending the literature on the problematisation of individualised consumer privacy. We argue that the way these imaginaries are constructed has implications for how privacy and surveillance will unfold in the future.