#118-Digital Avatars the Future of Social Media- Static Images, Dynamic Real, and Autonomous Twins

Sidhartha Sharma

I have been writing about the future of social media and data ownership for more than 5 years now.

In my book, Digital Event Horizon, and the blog below, I highlighted how the industrial IoT and consumer tech will be changed entirely during the period 2020–2030.

#88-Digital Twins and AI-Avatars will be normal by 2025–2030

As the metaverse, AI, and AR/VT hardware ecosystem come together- Be prepared for a world of social media that you have never imagined in the past.

It is important to understand the current phase of Social Media (in 2022-2023) before we leap into the future.

1. Currently, your social media profile has an image or a profile video that you have uploaded as your digital identity.
2. The user has to log into an account to interact with the social feed, videos, and data stream
3. User has to like, comment, and share the content that you see on social media
4. The user has to click, edit, and upload images, and videos on the social profile. The upload function has been automated thanks to design tools available in the market that offer social media integration.
5. Your virtual presence and activity are required for your social media account to be active.
6. AI use cases are confined to personalizing your current feed, and some experiments related to content filters and governance
7. Fake news, propaganda, misinformation and bot-based IDs (read fake profiles) are the greatest plagues of social media platforms.

What does the future look like?

The future of social media is controlled by a handful of corporations like — Meta (over 3 billion users), Bytedance (TikTok over 2 billion users), and YouTube (over 2.7 billion users), directly and indirectly by hardware/IOS owners like Apple, search-privacy, Android app store guidelines by Alphabet.

Apple single-handedly impacted the fortunes of social media players by introducing data-privacy guidelines (We all use Ask App not to Track feature on our iPhones). Before this feature was available, the app makers could access all the data via smart phones. As of 2023, Andorid is yet to implement such stringent data-privacy options for its Andorid users and playstore. The truth is billions of users in emerging markets do not even understand the topic of data-privacy well enough to safeguard themselves against it.

In the ideal future of social media 3.0 (2025–2035):

1. The user will have their dynamic digital avatars that will occupy their social media profile. They will not be static but dynamic
2. They will be models trained on all your past data that the social media companies have. For example, imagine FB, or Youtube allowing your avatar to be trained on your data since the inception of your account. Once cannot even fatOnethe power of these trained AI digital avatars.
3. They can give you insights related to your timeline, past activities
4. The user can regulate the AI Avatars based on levels of controls permitted in the system- completely static (base), hybrid controls (medium), to completely Autonomous (high). Imagine going to sleep at night and discovering that your avatar went for data with the avatar of another person in Paris (in the metaverse) and in the morning you get to see a snippet video or detailed video of the entire interaction.
5. This has the potential to disrupt the dating industry as well as virtual tourism
6. Fact-checks are available under any post which is not accurate. Twitter /X already experimented with this when Trump wrote a few controversial tweets.
7. Every account will have AI-based scores like- Factual information, original content, and red flags like fake news, hateful speech, and misinformation. This will help in analyzing the quality of your network and followers. Views and likes from non-relevant audiences should not mean anything.
8. Web3 ecosystem will be mature and the users will own the data they create on social media. They should get a piece of the pie from the money that social media companies make based on their data. Blockchain technology will make it easier to track the ownership of the content.

The future of social media is more exciting than you can think.

To understand this more, go through the following video and resources:

More on the Future of Metaverse here:

Decentralized data economy:

Connect with me on Linkedin, for my personal views:

Regards,

Sidhartha Sharma

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidharthasharmadigitalandstrategy/