The development of the metaverse presents an extremely complex socio-economic picture, with both positive aspects and many risks and challenges. At the recently held "Facing the Metaverse: Meeting the Third Wave of Network Society Development Seminar", the participating scholars called on the academic community to pay close attention to the impact of the Metaverse on the human economy and society.

The metaverse as a term is not a new concept. A more popular saying is that the idea of ​​the metaverse came from the novel Real Name and Real Name published in 1981 by American mathematician and computer expert Verno Vinch, which creatively conceived a virtual world. The official literary expression of the term metaverse appears in the 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche by science fiction writer Neil Stephenson. The novel depicts a sprawling virtual reality world. Here, people use digital avatars to control the world and compete with each other to improve their status.

Chen Guangjin, director of the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that, from the beginning of the concept of the metaverse, it is not purely a reference to digital technology events, but is full of creativity in the economic and social impacts and major economic and social changes that the development of digital technology may have. powerful imagination. Cai Jingmin, secretary of the party committee of Anhui University, believes that with the rapid development of network technology and artificial intelligence, the metaverse has increasingly evolved from the imagination of science fiction into an objective phenomenon.

At present, scholars tend to think that the metaverse is a digital living space with a new social system. Chen Gang, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University, et al. sorted out the five characteristics and attributes of the metaverse, namely social and spatial attributes, transcendental extension attributes of technology empowerment, co-creation attributes of human, machine and artificial intelligence, and reality and reality mapping. Attributes, affiliation and circulation attributes. Zuo Pengfei, secretary general of the Information Technology Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, once proposed that the Metaverse will bring great changes to people's lives and social and economic development in five aspects: from technological innovation and collaboration methods, to further improve social production efficiency; A series of new technologies, new business forms and new models will promote the transformation of traditional industries; promote the cross-border derivation of cultural and creative industries, which will greatly stimulate information consumption; reconstruct work and lifestyle, and a large number of work and life will take place in the virtual world; promote the construction of smart cities, innovation social governance model.

Chen Guangjin said that the Metaverse is essentially a process of virtualizing and digitizing the real world, which requires a lot of transformations in content production, economic systems, user experience, and the content of physical events. However, the development of the Metaverse is gradual, and it is finally formed by the continuous integration and evolution of many tool platforms under the support of shared infrastructure standards and protocols. In a nutshell, the metaverse is a virtual world in space and a real digital world in time. In this sense, it is no longer a sci-fi phenomenon, but has developed into a social force with sufficient objectivity, authenticity and independence, independent of human will. What people should do is face it, welcome it, and study it.

At present, human real life has begun to migrate to the virtual world. Chen Guangjin mentioned that the new visual scene generated by the metaverse will make more people immersed in the virtual world and unable to extricate themselves. How to maintain the positive interaction between the real world and the metaverse, play the positive role of the metaverse, suppress the negative role, and properly solve the problem of digital addiction in the future, requires in-depth thinking.

Metaverse is a brand-new fusion of people's digital behavior and social life, a deep reorganization of human spiritual space and social space under the new technology, and a new form of human society. Li Youmei, former vice president of Shanghai University, proposed that the metaverse may bring a series of new social phenomena, new problems and new contradictions, which forces sociological research to face new challenges that cannot be avoided. The traditional sociological research paradigm has become too weak in the face of the metaverse, and it is difficult to exert its due theoretical explanatory power. Facing the new mode of production and social experience of human beings, we need to use new horizons, new methods and new paths to open up new fields of sociological research; we need to be good at learning new knowledge, dare to innovate in theory, and promote sociology to realize the new integration of disciplinary knowledge and theories New developments in the pedigree.

Chen Guangjin said that from now on, social sciences, especially sociology, need to pay more attention to the impact of the metaverse, and put more effort into cracking the social code of the metaverse, so that the metaverse will become a bright universe, not a universe. dark universe.

The conference was organized by the School of Sociology and Politics of Anhui University in conjunction with the Research Center for Sociological Theory and Methods of Renmin University of China, the School of Philosophy and Sociology of Jilin University, the School of Ethnology and Sociology of Minzu University of China, the School of Society and Psychology of Central University of Finance and Economics, and the Humanities and Society of Xi'an Jiaotong University It is co-sponsored by the School of Science and the School of Humanities and Social Development of Northwest A&F University, and undertaken by the Digital Village Construction Research Institute of Anhui University.