Towards a Media Multiverse

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.