On its ascent arrive coveted top position In the app store rankings, BeReal — the French photo-sharing app launched in 2020 — has been heralded as the antidote to social media pranks. Preserving canny staging and skillful management, BeReal brings users just two minutes after the prompt to send dual front/rear camera images. Only after posting their own BeReal will users be able to watch their friends’ double montages of “timing and reaction“No filters and FaceTune.
Performance-sharing is incorporated into the app’s design: If someone misses the two-minute deadline or shoots back, their friends will say they haven’t. it’s real.
When self-advertising as “not another social network,” BeReal’s opposition to other platforms remains unwavering as it is irreverent. Its app store descriptionfor example, retargeting popularity aspirants to competitors with a fake quip: “If you want to be an influencer, you can stay at TikTok and Instagram.” Your story is other platforms is a magnet for shallow performance and inauthenticity — a portrait underpinned by “No bullshit. No ads” viewpoint.
While BeReal has been praised for it spontaneity, Unofficialand supply “glimpses of everyday life, “Many are wondering if it will outlive the hype. But perhaps a more important question is whether we, users, has outgrown the perfectionist like tally culture associated with mainstream social networks, especially Instagram.
By some accounts, we have: Researchers have noted a significant increase in “Social fatigue,” which they attribute to part of the pandemic. But even the most tech-tired among us can hardly ignore our quest to bring out our best (digital) selves. And so, despite the pretense of novelty, BeReal represents the latest iteration in the cycle of social media sites rooted in the pull-and-pull tension of authenticity and performance.
Research we have done on social media and youth cultures has made us skeptical of any guarantees of “reality” offered by platforms — or any public company. company, for that matter. After all, the promise of authenticity is profound, and around, rooted in brand culture. When, in 1971, Coca-Cola firmly declared its soft drink “the real thing,” it made a not-so-subtle push into competitor Pepsi. The result is all but dethroning Pepsi’s counterculture image of “brazen rebels [and] sassy upstarts bring to light the dull oppressions of the past. “As media historian Jefferson Pooley did, Debate, the more seriously we pursue an “authentic” sense of self, the more marketers try to entice us with products and services that can fulfill that need. But, of course, it was a Sisyphean effort.
As the “Cola Wars” are clearly shown, there is a generational dynamic that underlies the commercial promise of authenticity. In a 2016 essay, Real life editor and writer Rob Horning described “authenticity” as “the commercialized nostalgia for that lifestyle described by a range of different economic relationships: pre-fund, or pre-popularized or pre-globalized – any whatever word you want to use to describe what it looked like when you were nine years old, when everything was ‘real’.”
And therein lies a key to BeReal’s marketing gambit: its core focus on Gen Z,”digital native“The generation, never knew a world without social networks (literally, or at least conceptually). Within the framework of Horning, each generation has its own version of the more real world (the world familiar to you 9 years old). Depending on your age, that can be expressed in Facebook, askFM, My space, or perhaps no social media at all. While Gen Z’s “authentic world” is more likely to be a foundational symphony than previous generations, it’s worth noting that Gen Z members have been socialized in the arts. strategic self-presentation as far away as they can remember.
With each new app, Big Tech strives to provide us with a repackaged version of the authentication. But like users and advertisers join the war, the commercial imperative wins again and again. And so we shared our spontaneous collages on “anti-Instagram” until the Next Big App convinced us to give up the charade. In a 2017 paper, researchers Meredith Salisbury and Jefferson Pooley put forward the concept of “dynamic responseTo describe this cyclicality, in which each new social network defines itself relative to its predecessor. unauthenticated. They note that noisy platforms like Peach and It’s me selling versions of authenticity that their hyper-adherent competitors like Facebook and Instagram no longer offer. But, crucially, even the latter two promised authenticity in their earlier scaling days.
