On its ascent to the coveted prime spot in app retailer charts, BeReal—the French photo-sharing app launched in 2020—has been heralded because the antidote to social media fakery. Staving off canny staging and slick curation, BeReal provides customers simply two minutes following a immediate to submit a twin front-camera/back-camera picture. Only after posting their very own BeReal are customers capable of view their associates’ twin picture montages of “the moment and the reaction,” sans filters and FaceTune.
Performativity-shaming is baked into the app’s design: If somebody misses the two-minute deadline or retakes a shot, their associates are tipped off that they haven’t been actual.
In pitching itself as “not another social network,” BeReal’s rebuff of different platforms is as unabashed as it’s irreverent. Its App Store description, as an illustration, reroutes fame-seeking aspirants to rivals with a faux-taunt: “If you want to become an influencer you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.” The ur-narrative is that different platforms are magnets for shallow performativity and inauthenticity—a portrayal which is bolstered by its “No bullshit. No ads” stance.
While BeReal has been lauded for its spontaneity, informality, and provision of “unvarnished glimpses into everyday life,” many are questioning if it can outlive the hype. But maybe a extra essential query is whether or not we, the customers, have outgrown the tradition of likes-tallying perfectionism related to mainstream social networks, most notably Instagram.
By some accounts, we have now: Researchers have famous a big uptick in “social media fatigue,” which they attribute partially to the pandemic. But even the tech-weariest amongst us discover it exhausting to ignore the mandate to place ahead our greatest (digital) selves. And so, regardless of the pretense of novelty, BeReal represents the newest iteration within the cycle of social media websites that spring from the push-and-pull pressure of authenticity and efficiency.
The analysis we’ve carried out on social media and youth cultures has left us skeptical of any glib assurance of “realness” peddled by platforms—or any firm, for that matter. After all, the promise of authenticity is deeply, and ambivalently, rooted in model tradition. When in 1971, Coca-Cola resolutely declared its soda “the real thing,” it made a not-so-subtle jab at competitor Pepsi. The outcome all however usurped Pepsi’s counterculture picture of “impudent insurrectionaries [and] sassy upstarts flouting the dull repressive mores of the past.” As media historian Jefferson Pooley has argued, the extra earnestly we pursue an “authentic” sense of self, the extra entrepreneurs attempt to entice us with services that may fulfill that want. But, after all, it’s a Sisyphean endeavor.
As the “Cola Wars” made abidingly clear, there’s a generational dynamic underpinning the commercial promise of authenticity. In a 2016 essay, Real Life editor and writer Rob Horning described “authenticity” as “commercialized nostalgia for that way of life that was articulated by a different set of economic relations: precapitalistic, or pre-massified, or pre-globalized—whatever word you want to use to describe how it seemed when you were nine years old, when things were ’real.’”
Gen Z members have been socialized within the artwork of strategic self-presentation from way back to they’ll bear in mind.
And therein lies a key to BeReal’s advertising and marketing gambit: its core deal with Gen Z, the primary “digitally native” technology, by no means understanding a world with out social media (actually, or no less than conceptually). In Horning’s framing, every technology has its personal model of a extra genuine world (the one acquainted to 9-year-old you). Depending in your age, that might be epitomized by Facebook, askFM, MySpace, or maybe no social media in any respect. While Gen Z’s “authentic world” is probably going extra of a platform cacophony than earlier generations’ was, it’s price noting that Gen Z members have been socialized within the artwork of strategic self-presentation from way back to they’ll bear in mind.
With every new app, Big Tech mouthpieces attempt to beguile us with a repackaged model of authenticity. But as customers and advertisers be part of the fray, the industrial crucial wins out many times. And so, we share our spontaneous collages on the “anti-Instagram” till the Next Big App convinces us to desert the charade. In a 2017 article, researchers Meredith Salisbury and Jefferson Pooley supply the idea of “reactive dynamism” to explain this cyclicality, whereby every new social community defines itself in opposition to its precursor’s seeming inauthenticity. They observe that then-buzzy platforms like Peach and Beme peddled variations of authenticity that their ad-driven, hyper-conformist rivals like Facebook and Instagram not supplied. But, crucially, even the latter two promised authenticity of their earlier, scaling-up days.
