In his last public appearance, Mark Zuckerberg (owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram), defined what, for him, will be the future of his company and perhaps the evolution of the internet: metaverses. The concept, coined decades ago by science fiction, became fashionable again, and is a legitimate obsession of technology: more than replacing reality, creating a parallel environment that works permanently and in which the human presence is, say, as vivid as the real world; that somehow recreates and integrates many more activities than those that digital life allows today. Zuckerberg’s ambition, it is known, is great, but despite having more than a third of humanity connected to some of his networks, he admits that this task of founding, let’s say, a parallel reality will not achieve it alone. Microsoft, months ago, also put these “metaverses” as part of its great strategic objectives. And when it comes to exemplifying the great challenge of creating digital environments where people stay for a long time, carrying out activities that they usually did in the real world, online video games appear as a witness test, and online player collectives, leagues and competitive tournaments, the economic operations in internal currencies of those games, and the augmented reality accessories such as the scribbles of the design of that projected future. Ibai Llanos. Star at the reception of Messi, the story of the most popular Spanish-speaking streamer, whom celebrities choose to be interviewed The “streamers”, with their extended duration live, express much more than a nightmare for parents, as were the rockers long-haired, or a dream of easy millions, as were the footballers. They are the clearest attempt to prolong our life of entertainment in a parallel zone that is touched with the daily life that we know; They are simultaneous, contiguous, fluid. Messi, the global figure of these times, had never appeared on the popular social network Twitch, where his friend Kun Agüero and hundreds of millions of young people around the world – game fans especially – spend a lot of time hours. His first appearance, from the changing rooms of the Paris Saint Germain stadium, days ago, had Ibai Llanos as a premeditated host: he had been invited to travel from Barcelona to France, precisely, to participate in the tiny and select group of those who would have access to that privileged area and to dialogue with the star. His trophy, action more than words, was the autographed t-shirt.Until a little less than a year ago, Ibai lived, literally, in that parallel reality: the world of content creators, streamers, influencers, born figures and maids on social media functioned for him and many others as a media sphere on the sidelines. Underappreciated or abused by the traditional exercise of the profession, Llanos had made himself a privileged place in that universe: his histrionics, his spontaneity, his physiognomy, his laughter, his idioms had made him a figure in a territory in which, indeed , everyone starts on equal terms. All those qualities, perhaps, define him in his role: “entertainer”. What else to call the ability to keep tens of thousands of people hooked on a story about games of video games that are very similar to each other? How do we rate their unique ability to convey their immediate emotions on images that happen live, commonly called “react”, is it a sports activity or humorous memes? The ambiguous concept of charisma appears when the differential abilities of the streamers are tracked and difficulties appear to recognize their suddenness, their contagious mood and some incorrectness in the face of established communication standards … Cleared from many prejudices and some technological details, his skill – and that of many other of his colleagues, professionals of making live to collectively comment on an event – does not differ much from that of that late-night blooper commentator who later mutated into the great entertainer on Argentine television. But you can also see in him and his public evolution the test of how much more we will be willing to live, to entertain ourselves, in that parallel reality.
Source: The Nation
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