Abstract

Contemporary discourses around Extended Reality (XR) is increasingly dominated by the metaphor of the Metaverse, which envisions a unified, immersive, and algorithmically controlled media environment. This position paper critiques the ideological assumptions embedded in this metaphor, arguing that it promotes a striated and monopolistic conception of media space that undermines its potential hypertextual plurality. Drawing on hypertext theory, semiotics, and translation studies, the paper proposes an alternative counternarrative: the Media Multiverse. The Multiverse reimagines the mediascape as a smooth, hypertextual network of multiple, discrete, and interconnected virtual worlds in which users may move across environments and assume different identities. Rather than predicting a technological future, this conceptual framework offers a critical techno-social imaginary that challenges hegemonic XR narratives and foregrounds multiplicity, fragmentation, and interreal translation as defining features.

1 Introduction: Media and Spatial Metaphors

The way in which we describe, conceptualise and talk about media makes a large use of metaphors. Volli [35] describes how we use metaphors related to different actions (such as telephone, television, cinematography) to time (news, in English, but also Zeitung in German, or giornale in Italian), and to material supports (paper, film). Hypertextuality and internet connectivity opened the way to a different sort of metaphors, that is, spatial ones. Rooted in the material information grids that interconnect different computers, the metaphor of the “net” or the “web” has been extended beyond the infrastructure to the content it supports. The spatial terminology, therefore, extends to “(web)sites”, and “home(pages)s”, to the “cyberspace”, as well as digital “worlds”, digital “gardens” [5] and virtual “realities”.

Not all media spaces, however, are the same. Media spatiality rooted on hypertextual relations has been described often as a smooth space - described by Deleuze and Guettari [11] as having a rhizomatic structure, that can be navigated freely, and has little hierarchical structure. These metaphors are generally related to seafaring: the media space is like the Ocean: we can freely “navigate” and “surf” on it, and we need to develop some “cybernetic” competence (from the Ancient Greek word Kybernetiké, meaning “steering a ship”). And, like one might expect, this ocean is full of “pirates”.

The Internet, however, has been increasingly transformed into a striated space[11] where navigation is directed, impeded, and controlled. Algorithms have challenged the hypertextual nature of the Internet [24]. In general, the Web 2.0 has been marked by a series of design strategies that aim to lock in users and actively reduce the use of external links, something famously described by Hossein Derakhshan as "Death of the Hyperlink" [12]. Different metaphors reflect also this nature of striated, unidirectional spatiality: organised around “feeds” and composed by information “highways”, by “tubes”, “lanes”, “torrents” and “streams”.

Metaphors are far from neutral, and they often bring an ideological element with them: they ease understanding, but they hide interpretative choices [32]. The same is true for the metaphors we use to describe media. In this position paper, then, I want to critique a common metaphor that upholds an idea of striated, algorithmic spatiality in XR media: that of the Metaverse. And to do so, I will propose a different metaphor, rooted in smooth, hypertextual spatiality, to act as a counternarrative: that of the Media Multiverse.

2 Ideology and the Metaverse

Techno-driven representations of the future currently (in 2026) focus especially on AI and on different takes on Virtual Reality - two technologies that seem to recursively be at the centre of hype and animated discussions, and then be partially forgotten [18][26]. In particular, here I am interested in how digital media are depicted as part of an incipient new configuration of reality. The set of technologies that is generally referred to as Extended Reality (XR - including immersive Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and similar - see also [23]), increasingly in some form of combination with Generative AI, is currently at the centre of large corporate efforts to model future visions. This goes beyond the development of such technologies and of the products they support, and embraces strategic communication efforts to shape new narratives and models for the future. With some simplification we can highlight three main future avenues that have been put forward through different corporate narratives:

A narrative of Unification. If our mediascape is now scattered, all existing media will become part of one single, interconnected, immersive, mediatic space. In this space users maintain their off-line identity and they navigate it, and interact with other users according to spatial metaphors. It is the narrative of the Metaverse promoted by Meta.

A narrative of Integration. It is a narrative inspired by post-media [15] stances that imagines a nebulisation of media and their complete integration in everyday objects. Rather than a world dominated by screens or by headsets, this narrative imagines technology as ubiquitous and embodies. Everyday appliances become increasingly interconnected, “smart”, and able to "think" and to communicate with each other and their users. It is the narrative of Ambient intelligence, promoted by Amazon.

A narrative of Fusion. According to this narrative, the difference between the primary reality, digital media, and virtual reality progressively disappears. Users will increasingly inhabit a hybrid world where virtual overlays punctuate the users’ surroundings through forms of Augemnted and Mixed Reality. It is the narrative of Spatial Computing, promoted by Apple.

Among these three, that of the Metaverse seems to have been, so far, the most influential one. It has been capable of directing large investments, to capture the public imagination, and even guide large research efforts. Even if today there is some disillusionment towards the technology, and much of the buzz is now focusing on AI, Meta's narrative is still alive and well.

The term Metaverse, of course, predates Meta, and was coined by Neil Stephenson, in the sci-fi novel Snow Crash [31], to indicate a virtual-reality world that people could access through avatars. Building on the previous concept of cyberspace ([17], [7]), and possibly on early experimentations with spatialized massively multiplayer online role-playing game such as Lucasfilm Habitat, from 1985, the main idea was that of a navigable, 3D successor of the World Wide Web. Later on, Linden Lab would attempt to develop something along similar lines and create Second Life in 2003.

After that, for several years, the term Metaverse has been commonly used to describe a network of virtual worlds that is realistic, interoperable, scalable and ubiquitous [13]. The popularity of the term, however, increased drastically in 2021, when it was appropriated by Facebook - which concurrently changed its name to Meta - to propose their new corporate vision of a future where much of human mediated activity would take place in a single, overreaching immersive VR environment. There, users would have a stable digital identity, strictly connected to their offline one, and could accomplish everyday tasks such as work meetings and socialising with real-life friends.

Meta's Metaverse does not really exist. The company developed some platforms, such as Horizon Worlds, but they fall short of the vision they proposed to promote their idea of Metaverse. We are not dealing with a metaphor that the company uses to describe the current situation of our mediascape, then, but rather one used to envision its possible future. This metaphor has a strong ideological nature, it is organised around a techno-deterministic narrative with the purpose of shaping technical and social development, and of directing investors and users at the same time.

Despite the company's efforts in the creation of such narrative, this vision was not able to attract many users to Meta's Horizon Worlds. However, it did indeed have an impact on the popular imaginary. The term Metaverse was suddenly a buzzword, and it promoted a specific media ideology. In particular, it envisions a future where our mediascape is algorithmic, striated and controlled. Rather than a complex network of interconnected texts, the Metaverse is proposed as a single, self-containing environment, that does not need any external connection. Despite the new metaphor used to give it body, the underlining objective is an old one: like social media before, the Metaverse focuses on locking its users inside, maximising the profits derived from the management of attention economy [9] and contrasting the centrifugal forces of hypertextuality.

3 Enters the Multiverse

Despite its dismissal in Meta's Metaverse narrative, XR technologies present both challenges and opportunities when it come to the hypertextual dimension of our media environment. Hypertext research has already engaged with features relevant for XR, for example focusing on multimodal dimension [6], on spatial hypertexts and XR [3], and on VR hypertext environments, be it in games [20] or in tools [2]. Similarly, hypertextual projects like Dene Grigar's The NEXT 1 or Pathfinder [19] include in their efforts of digital preservation XR tools such as The NEXT's Viz Space. XR, additionally, also support a creative and radical rethinking of what hypertexts are and can become [21].

If we look at the current situation of our mediascape, we will see that, as of now, it still resembles more to a feral hypertext [36] rather than to a single, unified, Metaverse. Despite sci-fi imaginations and corporate pitches, our mediascape - especially when it comes to XR technologies and other 3D virtual spaces - is still very much fragmented, diverse, and pluralistic, featuring a kaleidoscope of different digital worlds and communities. This includes all sorts of screen-based 3D game worlds (such World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortinite) as well as those found in immersive VR (e.g., VR Chat, Decentraland), as well as a great number of instances of virtual spaces experienced individually, from digital games to VR tourism apps.

The narrative of the Metaverse describes this as a temporary stage in an unstoppable advance towards a unified digital space. While this might correspond well with the monopolistic ambitions of its corporate proponents, I am not convinced. In fact, many factors seem to point to a different direction.

First, as I have underlined when describing the different narratives around the future of our mediascape, there are concurrent competitive corporate efforts ongoing, each developing their own platforms, interfaces, and hardware. This is, in a way, similar to what is currently happening to video streaming platforms, that are multiplying as different IP holders want to monetise as much as possible their products. Netflix almost monopolistic position only a few years ago, has gave way to a variety of different services as each mass media and entertainment conglomerate want to have their own. Something similar might well happen - and it could be argues is already the case - with virtual and digital environments.

Second, the political and social fragmentation that divides our societies, as well as the competing interests of different regulatory actors is also likely be reflected in these digital environments [28]. Something similar has already happened with social media, where we can find both national alternatives (e.g., the Russian VKontakte) and political safe havens (such as Truth Social, made for conservative US Americans) that cater to specific audiences and communities. Arguably, this is also already happening in Social VR spaces as well. For example with Decentraland, which is strongly connoted by libertarian ideology, [25]), and has mainly attracted people interested in NFTs and Blockchain.

Third, it is important to remember that predictions based on the supposed marketability of innovation are not particularly trustworthy. Not only because they are ideological, but also because, as Engelbart reminds us, “markets do a bad job at assessing the value of innovation when that innovation is so new that it will actually rearrange the structure of the markets” [14]. It is not too surprising, then, that Meta's flagship Metaverse product, “Horizon Worlds” was nearly discontinued earlier this year.

The realisation of a single, all encompassing, monopolistic, Metaverse, then, does not sound very likely. I prefer, instead, to propose a different idea: a counternarrative that critiques and opposes that of the Metaverse. I call this counternarrative the Media Multiverse: a mediascape where users can connect to multiple, different, discrete, virtual worlds, and assume different identities across them. The Multiverse is a smooth space, where users, free from algorithmic control, can move across different “realities” and digital worlds. It is also a deeply hypertextual space: it works as a spatialized hypertext of hypertexts, made of interconnected virtual environments that are full of all sort of texts (written, audio, digital artifacts...), and that in many cases also have a hypertextual structure themselves (e.g., the many virtual environments that host games, see [1]).

I am well aware that this counternarrative has some utopian undertones. This is related to its raison-d’être: this is not an attempt to predict what the future of our mediascape will actually be, but rather it proposes an alternative imagination, a different way to conceptualise, conceive, and possibly design the media ecosystem of the future. It is also not to be understood as a final destination, neither strategically nor politically. Rather, it is the reification of a tension, the realisation of a structure that is crystallised in a specific - albeit open-ended - configuration.

In other words, I do not know if the Multiverse will ever come to be, or if it would even be possible to create one within a capitalistic framework. Nevertheless, I believe this counternarrative can offer us three benefits. First, it critiques and contrast an existing, hegemonic narrative, that of Meta's Metaverse. Second, it proposes an alternative future horizon, a techno-social imaginary [22], that can be a base for a reflection on how we want our mediascape to evolve and develop. Third, it is also a way to look back from the future to the present, highlighting tensions, tendencies, and processes that are ongoing and participating in the current configuration of our mediascape.

4 Conclusion: Engaging with the Media Multiverse

My main aim, in this position paper, was to introduce, contextualise, and explain the idea of the Media Multiverse. This, however is functional to a second-level objective, that it to propose and advocate for a specific interdisciplinary perspective - or a strategic combination of perspectives - to look at the Multiverse. In particular, I believe that three elements are key to continue developing this counternarrative: hypertext research, semiotics, and translation studies. While this collaboration brings about several challenges, luckily there are some foundations to build upon, both when it comes to combine different understandings of “hypertext” [10] and to apply semiotics methods and concepts in hypertext research [34], [30], [4]

The interdisciplinary collaboration around these three perspectives can help us to have a complex look at the possible evolutions of our mediascape, and it is crucial for the study and development the Multiverse counternarrative. On the other hand, it also echoes a need voiced within hypertextual research for more wholistic and collaborative approaches to its objects of research [8]. This combination, then, will allow us to investigate the Multiverse from different perspectives.

First, I hope to have demonstrated in this brief text the relevance of the concept of hypertext - and of the existing literature on the topic - as a constituent element of the Multiverse. This is a key feature to understand the different ways in which the mediascape and, in particular, its online extensions are conceived, designed, structured, and promoted, In particular the opposition between hypertextual and algorithmic principles is a cardinal one to distinguish the narrative of the Metaverse and the counternarrative of the Multiverse, as well as their political and social implications.

Second, semiotics can bring forward a different sets of relations between the many texts that populate the Multiverse. The relations between these texts extend both to their expression - and therefore their hypertextual relations following Nelson's definition the term "hypertext" [27] - and to their content, that is, their semantic links. This can be engaged using Genette's [16] definition of "hypertextuality". The two definitions highlight different kinds of relations between texts, both of which I find relevant when engaging with the Multiverse. While the parallelism between the two definitions and underline concepts is well known [29]- the difference here is relevant. The Multiverse is indeed characterised by electronic connections between its constituent parts, but it is also a transtextual net, where the texts it hosts are connected to one another also in terms of what they mean and represent. Genette famously defines hypertexts as texts that are derived from an hypotext, including relations such as translation in different languages or the adaptation of a book into a movie. These relations are strongly represented in a Multiverse that is, by definition, characterised by multiplicity and difference.

Third, the translational angle brought about by Genettian hypertextuality can become a key lens to look at how different texts circulate across the different spaces and media of the Multiverse. Objects, spaces, and even subjects from our primary reality can be recreated in different virtual worlds through different forms of interreal translation [33], including forms of 3D scanning or the creation of Digital Twins. This can help us focus both on the portability of different elements across different nodes in this spatialized hypertext of hypertextes, and help us look at the discourses or equivalence and permanence in the media space.

Hypertextual research, semiotics, and translation studies, then, can offer a solid base and a variety of tools and perspectives to both look at the current state and development of our mediascape, and to imagine - and possibly pursue - utopian alternatives to the ideological narratives we are constantly served.

Acknowledgments

Funded by the European Union (ERC, InterReal, grant agreement No. 101163472). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Notes

1 https://the-next.org/exhibitions

Source

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Imported from ACM’s structured HTML source. ACM Reference Format: Mattia Thibault. 2026. Towards a Media Multiverse. In 37th ACM Conference on Hypertext (HT '26), September 14--18, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA 4 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800935.3830841

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