BeReal and the Return to Social Media
By Katie Lotz
Graphics by Mariel Wiley, featuring illustrator Casey Beifuss
What did you do today? sometimes feels like a surprisingly loaded question. Our minds immediately scramble to compile a highlight reel of our day: the most productive moment, the most interesting event, the funny anecdote. Very rarely when someone asks what we did that day do we respond with the monotonous tasks of our daily routines: I made lunch, I sat at my desk, I got stuck in traffic, I brushed my teeth.
This same instinct is reflected on social media. The things that are worth posting are the events, best angels, staged candids. This is what makes BeReal, a French social media app that skyrocketed in popularity in 2022, so compelling.
The structure of BeReal is straightforward: once a day at random, the app sends out a notification informing users that it is “Time to Be Real,” meaning that they have two minutes to post a photo of whatever they are doing at that moment. Anyone who has been at a concert or party or even a coffee shop when the BeReal goes off can envision, and surely get a kick out of, the ensuing scramble to take and upload two photos, one with the forward-facing camera and one with the back. The app includes a timestamp with each Be Real post and notifies its users when their friends upload photos either on time or late. There are no stories, no highlights, no stylized profile pages; no real way to curate an online persona that is distinct from who you are in your day-to-day life. Most forms of social media have transformed from a way to update your family and friends about your life to an industry where each platform vies for consistent and constant attention. Be Real counters with the promise that it will ask for your attention once a day.
As the first generation to grow up with social media, Gen Z is slowly revealing what it means to inherently associate our social media presence as a key part of not only our intimate relationships, but with our identities. As we aged into our understanding of ourselves, social media aged alongside us, as if every little update added a new layer to the public persona we had been crafting since grade school. The ability to post stories, tag people in photos, untag ourselves from photos, construct a “close-friends list,” to add highlights to your profile: all of these new features allowed an even more nuanced digital presence to be curated.
Most social media platforms have become exhaustingly multifaceted; not only are there endless new features to check but there are also a plethora of advertisements and suggested posts to weed through. As social media platforms have become more complex, as has our relationship with them. What was once a novel way to interact with distant family and friends has evolved into a way to consume news, media and stay up to date on the lives and interpersonal drama of strangers; I have seen more TikToks dissecting the drama of Jojo Siwa’s love life than I have Facebook posts from my mom (which feels not wrong but … weird?). Even the way that users present themselves on social media has changed, which is reflected by various layout changes and new features; after all, what does the creation of a “close-friends story” reveal if not that most people on social media are aware that they are presenting multiple layers of themselves, performing for multiple audiences at a time.
To put it in a succinct way that is sure to elicit a horrified cringe from those who proudly grew up without the internet: I actually miss the days when my Instagram feed consisted of people I saw on a weekly basis, and also like, my mom. I feel nostalgic for a time when I interacted with my peers virtually in a much simpler way.
Many arguments can be made about the “point” of social media, and the pros and cons list of its subsequent impact on society is redundant and endless. Essentially, social media is an engrained aspect of society now whether or not we like it or choose to engage with it. Social media as a concept is not inherently good or bad, nor is BeReal immune to any cons associated with more mainstream forms of social media.
Rather, BeReal reveals something rather endearing about our inherent nature; at the end of the day, what we want to know about each other is the small details. What is attractive about BeReal is its banality, its pointlessness. When it comes to the people we care about, we want to know the boring. We want to hear about the traffic, dishes and homework. We want to see what photos they have on their walls and know what they ate for lunch. BeReal invites an odd degree of intimacy to the daily routine, to the habit of scrolling. What does your life look like at 2:37 p.m. on a Tuesday in mid-September? What do you choose to show people when no one is necessarily watching? What small detail felt significant to you in this otherwise mundane moment, and at what point will you look back on it fondly? ♦
