Reading Social Media Marketing Messages as Simulated Self Within a Metaverse: An Analysis of Gaze and Social Media Engagement Behaviors within a Metaverse Platform

The current paper discusses how individuals will process social media content within the metaverse world. Also, the current paper will propose an exploratory study that is designed to provide preliminary evidence regarding how individuals cognitively and emotionally process social media posts embedded in a metaverse platform where they experience the simulation of becoming their desired or positive “future self”. From data obtained from the gaze tracking and social media engagement metrics that measure users' simulated attentional and engagement behaviors, the author will examine to what extent the different temporal distances of virtual or simulated self (present vs near- vs far-future self) and the actual self (lowly vs highly conscientious self) interactively influences the durations of attention (duration of viewing the posts) to and the engagement (i.e., clicking “like” button for the posts) in different social media posts (e.g., news feeds, positive vs negative dog pictures in native adverts, a health marketing post) seen in the virtual computer screen within the virtual room. In general, it is expected that the father the temporal distance, the longer the duration of the attention to the social media posts. This effect can be moderated by the actual self-views. That is, for participants with negative self-views, the farther the simulated temporal distance, the shorter the duration of attention to the social media posts relevant for the positive self within the metaverse environment. The opposite results are expected to be observed from individuals with positive self-views: the farther the simulated temporal distance, the longer the duration of attention to the social media posts seen within the non-real or metaverse world. The analysis and the plan for the presentation at 2022 IEEE VR workshop is provided in this paper.