This chapter offers a vision—a set of recommendations—for the development of journalism of excellence in the Metaverse. Quality journalism is essential for any social system to function effectively and it is just as vital in a virtual realm, such as the Metaverse. Quality here is defined in terms of the truthfulness of journalism that utilizes the affordances of the Metaverse platform, as outlined in the EM framework. The chapter also presents a framework for scholarly inquiry regarding that journalism. This research is vital to the continuing development, improvement, and understanding of Metaverse journalism.

Six Broad Lessons

The vision offered here comprises a set of six lessons drawing upon the analysis in the first seven chapters of the book. First, Metaverse journalism should build on a foundation of three core principles: editorial independence, ethical practice, and full transparency. These principles will fuel journalism in its pursuit of truth in the Metaverse and mitigate potential bias or errors in reporting.

Second, as the shape of Metaverse platforms continues to become more clear, news media need to stake a claim before these realms crystallize and virtual land is out of reach. By establishing a presence early, news media can not only contribute to the shape of the Metaverse but also ensure that its structure, systems, and function embrace independent journalism and freedom of digital press.

Third, reporting in the Metaverse represents both a unique challenge and opportunity for news media. By tapping into the dimensions of immersion, data, interactivity, multisensory communication, AI/data, Natural User Interface (NUI), and first-person perspective, Metaverse journalism can develop a new approach to reporting that delivers DINE, or dynamic immersive news experiences.

Fourth, journalists in the Metaverse need an evolved set of skills to be effective as both reporters and storytellers. Doing this will happen only if human journalists and news avatars can work in a complementary fashion, with human reporters drawing upon AI as a supplementary tool. Used wisely and ethically, AI can prove valuable for quality journalism in the digital vastness of the Metaverse.

‘The Nile is pouring down gloriously, and really as blood […] and in the distance the reflection of the pure blue sky makes it deep violet. […] It is a beautiful and inspiriting sight to see the noble old stream as young and vigorous as ever. No wonder the Egyptians worshipped the Nile: there is nothing like it.’

In travel narratives to unfamiliar landscapes, where is as complex and crucial a category as who for ‘the place creates the subject’. Here, the Nile is the place that creates Lucie Duff Gordon (1821–69), who, in 1862, leaves behind her family in England, and travels to Egypt after contracting tuberculosis in the hope of finding a more hospitable climate. She ends up staying in Upper Egypt until her death in 1869, where she asks to be buried in the Christian cemetery according to Muslim rites. During her seven-year sojourn, she writes Letters from Egypt, some of which are published in Macmillan Magazine during her life. The popularity of the Letters was such that Macmillan printed three editions.

Duff Gordon's poor health condition confined her to Egypt in the last few years of her life. Her confinement, and sometimes physical immobility, that prevented her from returning to England imposed, however, a form of microtravel, which, though slower in movement, allowed her new forms of experiencing Egypt and understanding her body. Sailing on the river compensated for her lack of full mobility. It allowed her the expansiveness needed to counter her confinement, as she lived most of the time either overlooking the Nile in a house on top of the then unexcavated Luxor Temple or on Nile boats – called dahabeihas (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Her health condition and her association to the river set her journey to Egypt apart from the journeys undertaken by other European travellers, whose accounts had a clear strain of Orientalism and Western hegemony. Duff Gordon's cousin, Harriet Martineau, for example, visited Egypt in 1846 and wrote an account of religion and customs that she considered vague: Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848).

‘A Brave New World’ during the Pandemic

‘We are a country of inequality, and, alas, we have always been like that’, lamented Dania, an activist at HOME, a Milan-based association that, during the last 12 years, has been fighting for the recognition of migrants’ status and their rights in Italy. ‘What we see today, after twenty months of global pandemic, is just the ultimate revelation of a system which discriminates against and marginalizes those who are vulnerable, by denying them the basic social and legal rights that every human being deserves’ (10 August 2021, on Webex, interviewed by the authors). Beyond the Italian case, in high-income economies in East Asia, the inequality commonly suffered by migrant workers also worsened during the pandemic. When border closures interrupted migrant labour recruitment and led to labour shortages, migrant workers who remained in the receiving states, such as Southeast Asian construction workers in Singapore, might have been able to get a higher wage reflective of the decreased labour supply. However, as pointed out by Alex Au of Transient Workers Count Too, a Singaporean advocacy organization, ‘the number one priority is not the happiness of workers. If your project slows down, it's a temporary problem. But if you allow the wage to go up, then it's a permanent problem. The priority is not to allow it to go up. The government does not allow the market to operate efficiently’ (emphasis added, 28 September 2021, on Webex). As a matter of fact, the spread of the coronavirus around the world generated a new global ‘risk society’ (Beck et al. 1992), wherein a multilayered socio-economic and health crisis developed in the fertile ground of rigid ‘mobility regimes’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), which regulate the entry, employment, residency and citizenship of foreign workers. During the pandemic, the rigidity and discrimination of the two distinctive regimes implemented in Italy and East Asia led to inequality between citizens and migrants, both of whom bore the brunt but in various forms, to various degrees, with different legal statuses.

This book developed out of an interest in my father's make-believe stories when, as a child in the 1960s, I had begun to realize that I was different from many of my Anglo-Celtic peers living in a beach-side suburb of Sydney. A sense of my father's broken English articulated in the Australian public space reinforced for me a growing awareness of my own linguistic and cultural ‘otherness’. The lively scenes and images he conjured in his paramythia reinforced my loyalty and admiration for him, as they allowed me to see another side of him. He was no longer the marginalized migrant labourer with the stunted vocabulary, but the powerful storyteller whose vivid stories enabled dreams and wishes to become a ‘real’ possibility, albeit momentarily, during the actual moments of the paramythic experience. His paramythic voice transported me to a timeless zone, a borderless space in which ‘otherness’ did not matter. My father, the migrant storyteller, let go of all those handicaps and inadequacies that had muted him because of his lack of competence with English. I came to realize that those stories, which had inspired me in my formative years, were not merely Greek imaginative fairytales or didactic tales, but they had shaped my initial encounter with the culture of my parents. Indirectly, paramythia had transmitted the rhythms, philosophy and colourful language of another world that was different from my present reality but was not out of synchrony with the way I interpreted my present. Cultural otherness could be meaningfully mediated through stories, and so, as a natural progression, my own creative writing borrowed from this traditional narrative practice. The paramythic, within this context, signifies the influence of the oral tradition, and it was this element that subsequently informed my critical practice in multicultural literature. I am indebted to the Higher Degree Research team at Deakin University, and in particular Wenche Ommundsen, Frances Devlin Glass and Ron Goodrich, who guided me in this research journey with its multiple possibilities.

This book has a dual focus; it re-engages with a relatively neglected corpus of Greek Australian literary texts through the paramythic lens and situates this body of multicultural texts within transnational and global frames.

As important as structural and systematic considerations may be in the real world, they are at least as fundamental to the Metaverse (Flowers, 1995). When Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf conceived the Internet, its essence was the underlying digital structure. The only requirement for any computer network to connect to the Internet was that it conform to that basic structure. The digital structure likewise will shape and limit anything that happens within the Metaverse. As such, Metaverse journalism and how it functions will be subject to these same structural parameters.

This chapter outlines and critically examines the structural and systemic parameters that will define and shape journalism in the Metaverse. In particular, the chapter examines the legal and regulatory framework that constrains or enables journalism in the virtual world (e.g., how principles of freedom of speech and press may apply in the Metaverse) as well as the organizational mechanisms designed into Metaverse platforms that shape their affordances. The chapter considers the structural and systemic factors that will shape privacy in the Metaverse and how that will affect journalistic practice. The chapter examines the economic forces (e.g., revenue sources, ownership structures, system of financial transactions or currency … likely cryptocurrency) that will shape the Metaverse. This includes examining the ownership and financial models that will shape news media entities operating within a Metaverse platform. Finally, the chapter explores the likely organizational parameters of news media within the Metaverse. This means considering the need for a news “room” in the Metaverse, or whether some other collaborative or competitive structures make more sense.

Freedom of Speech and Virtual Press

One of the significant challenges of ensuring robust journalism inside the Metaverse is balancing freedom of speech and virtual press with legal and regulatory protections to ensure an environment that supports intellectual property (IP) rights, protections for privacy, and minimizes harm from mis- and disinformation as generated by AI or otherwise. Regulating something that does not yet exist, or at least is fully formed such as the Metaverse, poses particular challenges (Robertson, 2023). Yet, forming a regulatory structure before the Metaverse is fully formed may help to shape its contours before it is increasingly difficult and disruptive to change.

For over two decades, Sneja Gunew has advocated for a careful examination of literary texts that have been excluded or marginalized in Australian writing because she believes that such endeavours can offer new possibilities in how we read multicultural, migrant and diasporic writing. Such writing is well placed to unsettle conceptual ideologies of familiar and dominant world views because the writers revisit silenced histories, as well as forgotten elements of their cultural past, and salvage these in their writing. The specific focus on how to re-read various Australian writers of Greek descent through the frame of the paramythi has shown they have transformed collective cultural traditions and knowledge once considered irrelevant, fanciful or illogical into something new.

Some writers draw on their oral tradition for aesthetic purposes, but others have found that the collective voice of the past contains meaningful truths for them, or a voice that can powerfully contest prevailing power structures, especially the dominance of Western world views. Christos Tsiolkas in Dead Europe has challenged what he sees as the myth of Europe by deconstructing it. He places Europe in the centre of his narrative only to show how dead it actually is, especially around its peripheries. He subjects Europe, as well as Australia's colonial past to scrutiny. Similarly, Pheng Cheah contests the centrality of Europe by using the time/space illustration on colonial temporality. Stylianos Charkianakis, Dean Kalimnios and Antigone Kefala contest the centrality of the English language or monolingual colonization by drawing on their cosmopolitan double vision and using polyphony to defamiliarize the English language. These are some of the possibilities translingual texts offer contemporary readings of Australian writing, given they bridge the past and the present, the local and the global. All the writers in this study are mediators of culture – complex and experimental writers who make accessible various forms of identity, experience and transculturally mediated expression. Some of these authors have been categorized as diasporic or marginal because they identified with a minority language and culture in the Antipodes, either in the way they wrote in a non-English way, or in the way they showed a preference for writing solely in the Greek language with or without translations.

In January 2021, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an interview with two futurologists who reflected on a life without travelling and on how immobility in the context of the pandemic affects our society and individuals. Both experts agreed that we might be capable of compensating for immobility by discovering the ‘foreign’ in ourselves, in inner pictures, dreams and aspirations, at least for some time. But they were also sure that a society that does not travel loses an integral part of its essence in the long term. Racism and a lack of understanding towards other cultures could be the final result of confinement. To emphasize his point, the interviewee, Horst Opaschowski, talked about human nature: people ‘are not born to be inactive and cannot remain quietly within their own four walls in the long run’. To prove his claim, he draws on monks, who in the past ‘almost went mad’ by staying in their cells in the monastery.

On the one hand, although this assertion is highly questionable, it shows how monastic life is usually associated with immobility, narrowness and, as a consequence, great boredom. On the other hand, monks are often idealized for their stoic endurance of this very boredom, making them a role model for our stressful times. I am not sure whether monks would completely agree with any of these perceptions. Still, a statement like Opaschowski's invites us to consider the question of the relationship between monasticism, confinement and travel.

Against this background, the case study presented here focuses on a remarkable travelogue written by the Benedictine monk Honorius Philoponus and printed in the Austrian city of Linz in 1621. The author, physically bound to his abbey, invites his readers to join him on an imaginary journey to the New World. By doing so, Philoponus gives insights into his strategies for handling the tension between wanderlust and sedentariness. Most importantly, he shows how staying in one place does not necessarily mean not having foreign experiences.

Introduction

Raymond Boudon (1934–2013) developed a theory of values and normative beliefs that makes his sociological work a substantial contribution to debates—both theoretical and applied—on axiology. Raymond Boudon's Le Juste et le vrai and closely related writings, under focus here, have offered a comprehensive theory in the field. The author's axiology is rooted in the Weberian legacy of a general contrast between value-based rationality and goal-oriented rationality. The way in which this legacy has borne fruit in Boudon's work reflects a wide-ranging investigation of the scope and limits of so-called instrumental rationality and consequence-based explanation, as well as in-depth reflections about ethical inquiry as an object for social sciences. In contrast with the methodological choices in important sectors of individualistic social science (including the vast majority of contributions to so-called orthodox economics), rationality and morality appear to be closely associated in Boudon's thought and a basic reason for this is their affinity with the structure of deliberation and action.

As a result, it seems appropriate to handle Boudon's axiology and his views about human action together. Rationality and morality, in Boudon's approach, are connected with each other for reasons which are directly relevant to the scientific, explanatory approach to individual and social behavior. This thematic, which has gradually come to the forefront in Boudon's writings, has allowed him to articulate science and values in a very interesting way, which offers resources for ongoing debates about value-neutrality, the value of science, and the importance of human values in human endeavors (including social science and philosophy).

The theory of action and the theory of values actually come into contact with each other in the Boudonian corpus, and the resulting theoretical richness calls for methodological attention. To be sure, the way this conjunction proves fruitful in Boudon's research exhibits a degree of complexity. In particular, how do the reasons for action testify to our commitment to values and how do they relate, consequently, to the explanation of value-based action? The sociologist's appeal to substantial moral values is ubiquitous, especially in the systematic theory which is put forward in Boudon's great book, Le Juste et le vrai, and this suggests a solidarity of reasoning, commitment, and explanation.

Helen Koukoutsis's collection of poems titled Cicada Chimes identifies a modern young woman coming to terms with her father's death, an event that brought unresolved issues to the surface of her heart and mind. This title has aural and visual connotations of relentless, shrill cicada noises heard on long, hot Australian and Greek summer days. The image of cicadas chiming can be read as an extended metaphor of the poet's bereavement, but it may also depict how her memory oscillates between the past and present worlds. The chiming sound connotes constant rhythmic motion, which is strangely reassuring given that it is a familiar phenomenon of summer, although occasionally deafening. The poet mourns her father at Rookwood cemetery, and while standing near his grave, she experiences mixed emotions from her past, with her widowed mother next to her in the heat of summer. Her reflections throughout this collection indicate that grief heightens emotions, and so she is conflicted because of the way her parent's generation was marginally perceived by their host culture. She reacts against such marginalization because such limiting stereotypes are out of synchrony with how she views herself in the present.

Helen Koukoutsis is part of a new generation of poets of migrant background who resist being categorized as ethnic or migrant writers because they know such a designation renders their work minor in relation to Australian literary writing. To circumvent this, Koukoutsis resists peripheralization by extending the genre of modern elegy through a feminist poetics of the sacred. She approaches the divine with an animated style, an oppositional voice, and uses an experimental form that merges individual and communal expressions on grief. She draws upon modern Western and non-Western traditional influences and translates Eastern European and Greek cultural traditions, particularly those associated with rituals of mourning and bereavement. Her poems range from historiographical narratives on migration to explorations of intra-familial relations, while raising deep existential questions on life and death that reflect an anti-traditional, feminist spirituality.

Translation theory for literary translators sounds like a dry subject. Indeed, many eyes glazed over when I mentioned my excitement about writing this book. However, I find that time spent discussing theoretical approaches to literary translation is both fascinating and fruitful and I hope to convince you of this too.

Part of the impetus for this book was that I often had students, whether at BA or MA level, who were curious about translation and were even considering being translators but who were scared of theory or uninterested in theoretical ideas. To them, being a translator just meant knowing their source and target languages well and having excellent writing and editing skills. They felt that theory was complicated and disconnected from their work as translators. They would dutifully read the texts I assigned, but sometimes found them challenging or said they thought theory was irrelevant. The academy was not the real world, they said, and they did not see why they should read work by people who had not necessarily worked as translators themselves. Of course, it is true that a university campus is not exactly the real world, but it is part of it, and personally, I disagreed with them about theory not having any practical value or application. As a translator myself, I do not consciously think of theory as I translate but the ideas are always present and I ponder them as I analyse texts. I love to read other people's discussions about what translation is, what it can do and how it might work, and I am inspired by this as I translate. As a teacher, I wanted to encourage my students to have a broad range of tools and concepts in their translatorial toolbox, and I think theory is an obvious and important tool.

But it is important to note that I do not believe theoretical ideas are simply applied while someone translates. Sure, it might happen that someone gets stuck on a thorny translatorial problem and remembers a strategy that they read about. More often, however, theoretical concepts stimulate thoughts and offer options and approaches. In my 20-plus years as a translator, I have not often thought, ‘I read theory A that said I should do this, so I’ll do it as I translate’.