Being on social media, you tend to learn the cycle of trends pretty quickly. Every so often, a new seemingly creative social media app pops up and takes over, only for its hype to die down a few months later as the app gets lost in the mix of the million other social media platforms that aren’t as popular as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. The last app to gain significant traction was BeReal, the social media app that sends a notification at a random time every day, letting users know it’s time to “Be Real”, or snap and upload a photo of yourself and what you’re currently doing at that moment. The app encourages people to quite literally be real, as you cannot upload old photos and may only see what your friends have posted once you have posted yourself. Only recently, a new app called Lapse has surfaced, bringing back the once-popular disposable camera style photo. Users are able to take photos whenever, letting the app develop them. Once the photo is ready, you are free to post and share it to your albums or discard it. The app is invite-only, meaning you need a friend to send you a text upon setting up an account in order to join. This also means that you need to invite a certain number of friends to join the app when registering. The fun aspect of Lapse is that the photos are real, raw, and unedited as they are uploaded straight from the app after they are developed in the “darkroom”. Lapse encourages authenticity, and like BeReal, it excludes followers as an aspect. Users only have “friends”. The recent success of apps like BeReal and Lapse is proof that casual social media use is trending and something that young people prefer to see and use. Maybe there is hope for our generation!
The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Holy Cross chapter.