Achieving Authenticity on Social Media is Inherently Fake
BeReal: uploading, uploading, uploading …
It’s time to BeReal! Or BeFake! Or whatever you must tell yourself to justify being on social media all the time. Despite any app’s best efforts, logging on is an act of performance.
BeReal attempts to pursue sought-after authenticity on social media. It tells users to take a photo during a certain time of day, and in turn try to be as present as possible when sharing one's life on social media. It is possibly one of the first apps that deconstructs the notion of social media as a highlight reel. The app implies that we are in too deep to get rid of social media, so we might as well try to reform it.
The point of BeReal is to take a photo that is not “Insta worthy” and share it. Yet, so many users still create the facade that they are doing something exciting. It is pointless to use this app outside its intended purpose, because then it is just feeding into conventional standards of posting curated and edited images.
Though it can be the fault of the user, the app itself does have flaws in its concept of authenticity. Having two minutes to upload a photo means taking an extra picture to look your best on camera, and it doesn’t stop anyone from taking a photo hours after the notification goes off. Waiting to post with people defeats the purpose.
The social media monster has lured us to the virtual world and sunk its teeth in. Now, the BeReal app tells us specific times that we need to be active on social media. Ironic, isn’t it? The app that invites us to be more authentic in our social media presence requires us to take part in the virtual world when they deem it the right time. It feels a bit ingenuine for something that is so real…but hey, at least my BeReal uploaded in time!
We are obsessed with the concept of being real, but are all consciously aware that social media is not. Even though BeReal has convoluted effects of real or crafted authenticity, it shouldn’t be seen as a superior app because it's “more real” than the others. It’s dependent on how users interact with it.
There is pressure to normalize a boring day so that others realize they do not constantly need to be surrounded by friends. Then on the flip side, there are users who consistently post with friends. This produces a zero-sum game. BeReal takes a snapshot – one second out of the 86,400 seconds we live each day. How authentic is it when we post only a minuscule fraction of our life and call it being real?
I don’t think the solution here is to vlog and record every second of our days. To be completely honest, there might not be a solution. We are all cogs in the machine of the virtual world; if we want more authenticity in our lives, the whole system must collapse. However, we won’t give up on social media any time soon. We will still post and share and like and click, because we crave an online presence – it doesn’t matter if it's real or fake.