Stella Guzik
If you’ve been on a college campus this year, you’ve probably heard of the app BeReal. BeReal, in theory, removes the careful planning of other social media apps and replaces it with spontaneity and the idea of being real.
The app sends one notification a day and phones are swiftly pulled out, snapping two quick pictures, one from the front camera and one from the back. The photos are immediately uploaded to feeds for personal friend lists to view and react to.
Rachel Rothenburg, an AU junior, has been on BeReal since May of this year. She says, “The people who were on it and promoting it were very excited about it. It seemed like it had a lot of personality and brought people together.”
She says that she forgets to take photos and BeReal is a great reminder to document her life while still living in the moment. You take the photos and post them, then put your phone away again.
As a Resident Assistant, she decorated her floor with a BeReal theme this year. It features important information for her residents while also highlighting some of her favorite BeReal photos from her account.
Some aspects of the app are not as new to social media users, though. “Say I was out all day, and I come home and I get the BeReal notification, I’m mad because I’m like why did it not go off when I was having so much fun so I can show the world how much fun I’m having?” says Rothenburg.
She continues, “But I have to remind myself that’s not the point of the app and I’ll still post the picture, obviously. I would say there’s less pressure about looking good and more pressure about proving to people that you’re doing something fun.”
It has been proven that limiting use of social media correlates to lesser feelings of depression and loneliness. Some users cannot help but compare themselves to others, potentially fueling feelings of inadequacy.
BeReal, while trying to eliminate the specific curation of personal image, does not manage to get rid of the comparisons that arise while seeing pictures from other people’s lives. BeReal still supplies users a way to control how their lives are viewed because users are able to wait and take their photos at the best moment of their day. If photos are taken late, they are labeled as such in the feeds.
AU sophomore, Jane Fusco, does not have the app for this reason. “It kind of gets rid of the idea of BeReal because you can make yourself up.” If she did have the app, she says she would want to have an appealing aesthetic, forcing her to take the photos late. “I think that’s probably a detriment to the brand because it’s supposed to be wherever you are in the real moment.” She does not have BeReal and cannot see herself downloading it in the future. She has Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok and Twitter and believes that BeReal does not offer her anything that differs from those apps.
Fusco says, “I think it has benefits and if we continue down this path, then it would be a healthy way to think about social media. Just be real wherever you are, but the realistic thing is that it’s not what social media was built to be, so I don’t know how long this trend is going to stick around.”