Abstract

Today's mediatic spaces seem to continue to fragment across different platforms and virtual worlds. For this reason, we foresee that the future of the mediascape will not be a single, unified Metaverse but rather a pluralistic and diverse "Media Multiverse". This multiverse is a hypertextual space, which can be understood both as a network of interconnected digital environments and an intertextual space shaped by relations of translation, adaptation, and reinterpretation. This speculative design workshop welcomes researchers and practitioners to explore how this emerging and future multiverse may be reshaped through communication across primary reality and multiple mediated "alternative" realities, including AR, XR, VR, and digital virtual worlds. Participants will develop and critically probe sociotechnical imaginaries of communication by constructing personas and creating speculative artifacts in different textual formats. Overall, the workshop aims to generate counter-narratives to the generic, singular vision of future media while opening new questions about hypertextuality, communication, and translations between different realities.

1 Introduction

Our mediascape - defined here as the ensemble of media and technologies that support and shape communication - is in continuous evolution. While its exact future might be impossible to predict, many ideological discourses surround and direct our imagination. Narratives such as those of the "metaverse" as well as those surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not only ways to understand and attempt to predict technological and semiotic developments, but also to attract investments, sway policymaking, and gain a central place in the common imaginary.

Our workshop is developed as part of the InteReal project (EU, ERC StG), which employs a multidisciplinary methodology, bridging between semiotics, translation studies, design, and HCI, to look at the relations between different mediatic spaces and our primary reality[21]. Building on these bases, in this workshop we will focus on hypertextuality as a key element of the future mediascape by exploring possibilities that go beyond the prevailing view of a singular metaverse in the direction of plurality, fragmentation, and diversity through a speculative method [9]. We foreground communication as the main theme of the workshop to reveal insights into how different encounters can happen within a "Media Multiverse" and how entities may communicate, connect, or argue with each other within this plurality. Overall, we aim to contribute to research that surfaces under-explored experiences and counter-narratives by enabling critical discussion through a speculative design approach.

2 Background

2.1 Hypertexts and the future of the mediascape

One of the most influential narratives describing the future of media that is capable of directing large investments as well as research efforts, is that of the Metaverse. The term, coined by Neil Stevenson in his novel Snow Crash (1992) has been later reused to describe a network of virtual worlds that is realistic, interoperable, scalable and ubiquitous [8]. The term reached mainstream discussions when, in 2021, it was appropriated by Facebook, which was simultaneously renamed Meta, to propose their corporate vision of a future where much of human-mediated activity would take place in a single, overreaching immersive VR environment were users would have a stable digital identity, strictly connected to their offline one. This vision was not able to attract many users to Meta's Horizon Worlds, but did indeed have an impact on the popular imaginary and promoted a specific media ideology. In particular, it envisions a future where the hypertextual nature of the Internet is mostly neutralized and contained. Rather than a complex network of interconnected texts, the Metaverse is proposed as a single, self-contained environment that does not need external connections. Far from being a new idea, this is an evolution of the media ideology and architecture that, starting from the Web 2.0 has seen platforms being redesigned to keep users in and reducing the use of hyperlinks through content snippets and previews, something famously described by Hossein Derakhshan as "Death of the Hyperlink" [7]. Like social media before, the Metaverse focuses on locking its users inside, maximising the profits derived from the management of attention economy [5] and contrasting the centrifugal forces of hypertextuality.

2.2 From the Metaverse to the Multiverse

Despite both scientific and corporate visions, the current state of our mediascape is still fragmented and diverse, featuring a kaleidoscope of different digital worlds inhabited by different communities, be it in screen-based game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite), or in immersive VR, such as VR Chat and Decentraland. We can even further add countless other instances of virtual spaces to be experienced individually, from digital games to VR tourism apps. While defenders of the idea of Metaverse see this as a temporary stage in a path towards a unified digital space, we believe this to be less than likely.

Several factors seem to be going in the opposite direction. On the one hand, we have competitive corporate attempts to each create their own platforms and interfaces - something that echoes the multiplication of video streaming platforms [20]. On the other hand, political and social fragmentation is likely to also lead to a multiplication of digital environments [18]. This parallels what is already happening with social media with the creation of national alternatives, such as the Russian VKontakte, as well as the creation of political alternatives such as Truth Social, made for conservative US Americans [2]. There are also some existing examples in VR, such as Decentraland, which is strongly connoted by libertarian ideology [13]. Rather than a Metaverse, then, we argue that we are facing the rise of a Media Multiverse where users can connect to different, discrete, virtual worlds, and assume different identities across them. The Multiverse, because of its structural heterogeneity, has a deeply hypertextual nature: it is an hypertext of hypertexts, made of interconnected virtual environments that are full of all sort of texts (written, audio, digital artifacts, spaces, etc.), and that in some cases have an hypertextual structure themselves (as in the case of all virtual environments that host games, see [1]).

Additionally, the relations of all these digital worlds between them and with our primary reality opens them to a different form of hypertextuality, one that is not based on Nelson's definition of the hypertext [16], but on Genette's [10]. In other words, the Multiverse is not only a mediascape that is characterised by electronic connections between its constituent parts, but also an intertextual net, where the texts it host are connected to one another also in terms of content. Genette defines hypertexts as texts that are derived from a hypotext, including relations such as translation in different languages or the adaptation of a book into a movie. The Multiverse, then, is also full of this sort of hypertextual connections, where objects, spaces, and even subjects from our primary reality are recreated in different virtual worlds through different forms of interreal translation [21], such as forms of 3D scanning or the creation of Digital Twins. With this understanding, hypertextuality can become a key concept for a critical take on the future of our mediascape and for the creation of counter-narratives that contrast the monopolistic ideology of the Metaverse.

2.3 An (Hyper)Textual Approach to Speculative Design

Speculative design is an approach for creating narratives that speculate on the future through fictional objects, as argued by Dunne and Raby, also through environments and spaces that depict what the future might look like when different aspects are considered as a whole [9]. In this sense, speculative design aims to branch out in different directions and explore the many possibilities of potential futures, rather than identifying a single probable future.

Within this understanding, speculative design is often associated with the criticality of existing generic discourse. Therefore, one of the key characteristics of speculative design is that it does not simply create abstract future scenarios, but rather that the envisioned futures need to be contained and supported in some sort of artifact of any scale, that is, an object that contains and communicates the speculation.

The products of speculative design can be many. Some of them are indeed linguistic texts, such as classified ads [17], pastiche scenarios [22], short fictional abstracts [3], short stories [15], and even fictional papers [12]. Other products are closer to the classical products of design efforts, such as diegetic prototypes, that is, non-working prototypes of future objects [11], or videos and storyboards portraying interaction with future technologies. From a textual perspective, however, technological gadgets, digital objects, and all sorts of other artifacts (like an image, a game, or an object) can also be understood and approached, as texts. In turn, these speculative design products can be understood as components of an hypertextual network such as that of the Media Multiverse, providing interesting entry points to discuss what the future of our mediascape might be.

3 Workshop

In the workshop, we will facilitate speculative design practices to guide participants in ideating fictional artifacts that communicate between the primary world and different media realities, such as AR, XR, and VR.

We will provide templates and tools to scaffold the design activities that participants can use regardless of their background and previous experience with such methodologies. In this regard, we invite 6-24 participants who are researchers or practitioners in HCI, interaction design, media and communication, translation studies, or other relevant fields. To join the workshop, we will ask participants to submit a short statement of around 200 words describing their interest and background in the topic.

3.1 Phase 1: Introduction (15 min.)

We will provide a general introduction about the objective of the workshop, as well as concepts such as the Media Multiverse and interreal translations, and the different understandings of hypertextuality that can be used to understand them. Then, we will briefly present the speculative design methodology and explain how it will be used in the workshop. After the introduction, the participants will be divided into groups of two or three.

3.2 Phase 2: Exploration (90 min.)

3.2.1 Step 2.1 Creation and sharing of personas. To achieve a coherent process of persona creation across different groups, we will use character sheets similar to those used by Bujić et al (2025) [4]. Participants will fill in information about their character, including what kind of primary or digital world they exist in, how they started becoming part of this world, their character traits, their problems and expectations, what kinds of communication modes they already use and what communication limitations they have, and whether they have ever travelled to other digital worlds and, if so, which traits or communication modes changed during that time. Participants will be encouraged to create varied types of personas, including those of non-humans and underrepresented groups, that may already exist in different realities.

3.2.2 Step 2.2 Artifact creation. Participants will use bodystorming to ideate on different texts, which can take written, visual, or object-based forms that could enable and support the chosen mode of communication [19]. During this bodystorming activity, group members will engage in role-playing, including creating impromptu dialogues and short texts among their personas and making low-fidelity prototypes that act as speculative artifacts using the stationery materials that we will make available to them. For example, one group might design a metro ticket as an object-based artifact that works in primary reality that also serves as an XR access token, while another group might create a postcard as a written text whose lines become links or windows to other spaces in VR. Working as a group, participants will map their outputs following the logic of the examples above, treating them as part of the same hypertext and collaborate to ideate on the links that might connect their artifacts, personas, and environments of primary reality, AR, XR, and VR.

3.3 Phase 3: Discussion (60 min.)

Each group will discuss their personas and speculative ideas by elaborating on how and where the artifacts exist within the media multiverse and on their impact in the mediascape. They will also reflect on the medium that produced the speculation and how did the medium impacted the speculation process. The presentations may be recorded with the informed consent of the participants, as they will be subject to further analysis in the project. In the final part of the workshop, we will also discuss with the participants the opportunity of a collaborative future publication showcasing the speculations created together.

4 Expected Outcomes

This workshop will be the first of a series of exploratory activities to critically examine the current narratives and ideologies around our mediascape and to explore alternatives for its future around the idea of the Media Multiverse. This planned workshop series, part of the work we are planning for the InterReal project (ERC-StG) aims at exploring counter-narratives and alternative ways of existing within a more pluralistic mediascape than the one envisioned by corporate ideology, including the perspectives of under-represented groups and more-than-human entities.

The workshop at ACM Hypertext 2026 will provide three main outcomes that support these goals. First, it will be a testbed for the approaches and methodologies we are developing for this workshop series. Second, it will allow us to highlight and engage in depth the notion of hypertext, which is central in our understanding of the Media Multiverse. Finally, we plan to analyse the fictional artifacts produced by the workshop participants to provide a first look on what the Media Multiverse could look like.

5 Organizers

The workshop has been structured based on the organizers’ previous experience in facilitating speculative design workshops (see, for example, [4][14][6] [23]).

Mattia Thibault is a Professor in Translation in the Creative Industries at Tampere University. His research focuses on semiotics and translation, extended realities, speculative research, and playfulness in the built environment (real and digital). He is the leader of the InterReality Research Group, which focuses on the relations between different virtual spaces (and their inhabitants) and their connections with the “real” world.

Cansu Çetin Er is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University. She holds a PhD in Interaction Design from Koç University and has a background in architecture (BSc, MAA). Her research interests include playful and gameful interactions, human-building interaction across physical and digital realities, and speculative design.

Acknowledgments

This research is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Grant agreement (ERC StG InterReal, 101163472). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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Imported from ACM’s structured HTML source. ACM Reference Format: Cansu Çetin Er and Mattia Thibault. 2026. The Media Multiverse as Hypertext: A Speculative Design Workshop to Explore Communication within Future Mediascape. In 37th ACM Conference on Hypertext (HT '26), September 14--18, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA 4 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800935.3838294

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