Ignas Kalpokas is Associate Professor in the Department of Public Communication, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunus, Lithuania, where he also heads the MA programme Future Media and Journalism. His research focuses on the social and political impact of digital technologies, fake news and information warfare, and media theory. Ignas's teaching stretches across the domains of journalism and media studies, disinformation and propaganda studies, and geopolitics of the internet. He is the author of Creativity and Limitation in Political Communities: Spinoza, Schmitt, and Ordering (Routledge, 2018), A Political Theory of Post-Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Algorithmic Governance: Politics and Law in the Post-Human Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Malleable, Digital, and Posthuman: A Permanently Beta Life (Emerald, 2021), and co-author of Deepfakes: A Realistic Assessment of Potentials, Risks, and Policy Regulation (Springer, 2022).

Julija Kalpokien¿ is a qualified Lithuanian attorney specialising in commercial law and dispute resolution with a particular interest in intellectual property, data protection, and IT law. She is a PhD candidate at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunus, Lithuania, where she is a Junior Research Fellow, teaches Technology Law, and is course leader for An Interdisciplinary Introduction to AI. Julija also has experience in internet governance and policy work. Her research focuses on internet regulation, cybercrime, technology regulation, with a particular focus on AI and creativity, and more generally intellectual property and privacy law. Julija is also an active member of the Lithuanian Young Bar Association where she is Vice-Chair of the Kaunas Chapter and a member of the Information Committee. She is co-author of Deepfakes: A Realistic Assessment of Potentials, Risks, and Policy Regulation (Springer, 2022).

1 Introduction

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2 Why Now?: From Mediatisation to Virtualisation

2.1 Mediatisation and the Immersed Individual

2.2 Platformisation, Datafication, and the Technology-Experience Nexus

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3 Understanding the Metaverse: Beyond the Hype

3.1 Building the Metaverse: Key Opportunities and Challenges

3.2 Experiencing the Metaverse: Enhancements and Limitations

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4 Doing Things: From Work to Sex

4.1 The Economic Side of the Metaverse

4.2 Acting and Feeling in the Metaverse

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5 Law, Life, and Governance

5.1 Conceptualising Life

5.2 Conceptualising Governance

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6 Security, Regulation, and Other Challenges

6.1 Old Wine in New Bottles

6.2 New Wine in Old Bottles

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7 Concluding Thoughts

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Index