Originally appeared in print, April 2020. Illustrations by Emily Stevenson.
Late one Tuesday night my flatmate comes running into the kitchen, barely holding in her excitement. “It’s BeReal time!” Before I can give her the very embarrassing news that I do not actually know what “BeReal” is, her phone is out and she’s taking a picture of me sitting on the sofa.
Over the past few weeks, BeReal has made a name for itself on Trinity Campus. The app was originally uploaded to the App store in 2020, created by entrepreneur Alex Barreyat. Barreyat decided to create the app as an alternative to the inauthentic posting behaviour that he noticed was plaguing social media. While the app has been around for a few years now, it only recently gained popularity among university students, currently ranking #10 in social networking on the App store.
BeReal is a social media app that claims to be unlike any other; it demands for you to be your most authentic self. This is done by creating a time constraint on when users are allowed to post. Throughout the day, users will receive a single notification. From the time of receiving notification, users have 2 minutes to take a picture (from the front and back camera). This then gets uploaded to your profile, followed only by your close friends. BeReal attempts to eliminate the falsity that other social media apps, such as Instagram, have come to harbour. In allowing users a select amount of time to post, authenticity is more or less guaranteed. BeReal must then definitely “be real”. It would seem as though, for the most part, users are respecting the philosophy upon which the app was founded. My flatmate posts herself just waking up from naps, we posted a selfie during a lecture today (shh). But how are we to be sure that BeReal is truly real?
There is a sort of epidemic that has contaminated all forms of social media: posting is no longer about sharing your day-to-day, or about likes and dislikes. Sites such as Snapchat and Instagram specifically have been transformed into marketplaces; marketplaces for goods, but also (and more importantly) for a specific lifestyle. In the past, your Instagram page would be a casual collection of things you enjoy, things you were doing with your friends. Today it seems as though the Instagram page has become the individual user’s carefully curated brand; we don’t have to be subject to ads and promotions, we make them ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we are all becoming influencers, but to a certain extent we all unconsciously try to show certain more ‘posed’ parts of our lives. The nature of social media requires that we portray ourselves — this can also be seen in the recent rise in “casual” photo dumps. Without realising it, we all tend to adhere to this unspoken social media rule: we all try to perform or display a lifestyle that is usually only a small fraction of who we are.
Being part of a generation that grew up with the internet, there would be a constant reminder that not everything seen online is real. Despite the warning, it is still quite easy to buy into the fantasy world that social media sites like Instagram produce. So with its rise in popularity, why should BeReal be the exception?
The app claims to be the outlier from the rest, an oasis of guaranteed authenticity. How can we know this to be true? For the time being, BeReal has maintained the status of a pseudo private Snapchat story; you choose who sees your posts, and you generally post things you wouldn’t want to share outside of your close group of friends. However, as the app grows in popularity can you really promise that you won’t be tempted to be a bit more performative? Further, how can we be so sure that companies won’t come into the app, as they did with Instagram and Snapchat, and start capitalising off of users and their adherence to social media norms.
While the time limit on posts offers a form of constraint on what and when users can post, posts can still be made when the time limit expires. In the week that I have had BeReal, it seems as though every time someone posted late, they were either with friends, or doing something interesting. This isn’t to shame those people, but it goes to show how much this idea of curating our social media has wormed its way into our everyday lives. This doesn’t apply to everyone, there are still some people out there keeping it real. However when it comes to social media we must ask ourselves whether we ever really portray ourselves honestly — because the whole point of social media is to portray yourself, not to actually be yourself.
