BeReal: The Latest in “Fake” Social Media Apps
Picture this: It’s after school, you’re laying in bed, hair all messed up from the six-hour school day, shoving cheez-itz into your face, and just being yourself. A buzz emerges from your phone– time to BeReal! You take your quick photo of yourself chilling in bed, and as your friend’s photos start rolling in, you reconsider. They’re out with their friends, playing sports, or look like they’re ready to strut right onto a red carpet. Quickly, you scramble to your photo, select the reshoot option and spend the next five minutes fixing yourself up and taking and re-taking photos. Is this being real?
BeReal, created by Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, is a new app that asks users to take a photo of themselves every day at a random time, encouraging users to follow the company's mantra and be “Real”. They also promote their own RealMojis, which allows the person seeing the BeReal to react with an image of their current face. So, instead of trying to put your best self on show with apps like Instagram and Snapchat, BeReal wants you to be your authentic, true self. The question is, does the app work? Does the app make people BeReal?
The concept of being “real” isn’t anything new. Companies, social media or not, have been trying to push the idea of being “real” toward their consumers since 2003. Take Coca-Cola for example. Their whole slogan “It’s the real thing” was used in an effort to show that young people want real and original products or ideas: an escape from “phoniness”, according to MediaVillage.
Similar to Coca-Cola, social media companies have been trying to emulate realness. Minutiae, made by Martin Adolfsson and Daniel J. Wilson, was an anti-social media app whose users capture what is going on right in front of them when their daily notification goes off. In an article with Mike O’Donnell at Working Not Working Magazine, Adolfsson said that the app was intended to capture the “In-between moments, the nuances of daily life that often get overlooked.” Sound familiar?
The thing is, social media can never be real. People are putting themselves on display for everyone to see– of course, they’re going to want to look good. When asked if they have retaken their BeReal, an action other users can see, 42.5 percent of students interviewed said yes. “I’d say that BeReal feels a lot more casual than Instagram or Snapchat.” Said Ava Risser, 11, a BeReal user. “If I’m going somewhere, I’ll wait until then to take my picture, and if I’m too tired to do it, then I’ll wait to do it later too. You’re still posting online though, so I won’t post anything too embarrassing.” With the ability to react to photos with a picture of their faces, no wonder people want to impress.
At the end of the day, there will never be a social media app that can make us real. Neither the platform nor the people on it can cure Mankind’s desire to be well perceived. When people are posting on social media, they want to be seen: not how the app intends, being themselves, being “Real”– but how they think others want them to be.