by Emily Mosier
It could come at any time. While I’m brushing my teeth in the morning. While I’m writing an article after lunch. Or even while I’m jamming to music in the Cookout drive-thru at 1 a.m. But when the BeReal notification does go off, I don’t have to be ready for it.
BeReal is a social media that people love to hate, but I have to disagree. I downloaded it in September, and it has become one of my favorite platforms.
At a different time every day, I get a notification on my phone. I then have two minutes to take a photo with both my front and back camera. Of course, I can always post late and usually do. You can only see someone else’s photo after you’ve posted your own, and it only remains public until the next notification goes off. No filters. No Facetune. No planning.
I am not the type of person who thinks to take pictures of anything. But I find BeReal to be fun and low-stress, and now I have tons of pictures of all the different things I do in college.
I also convinced my grandmother to download the app (she loves seeing pictures of me), and now I have an entire album of her pictures when before I had almost none. And I know that there will come a day when those pictures will be my most prized possessions. My grandmother often calls me to talk about whatever I posted, which I love. As awful as it sounds, I am a very busy person and don’t always remember to call.
We live in a society where you can’t avoid social media. You have LinkedIn for work, Instagram for self-promotion, and Facebook for family. But BeReal is fun, and there’s a lot of room to be creative with it.
The biggest criticism against the app is that it doesn’t achieve what it advertises itself to be: an authentic social media platform. To an extent, this is true because users have the option to post late, so they could simply wait until their doing something interesting. However, people aren’t always on their phones, and you obviously can’t stop in the middle of class or a work meeting to take a selfie. There really is no such thing as an authentic social media, but since I don’t use the app for that reason, it doesn’t really bother me.
And unlike Instagram, there’s zero social repercussions for posting a “bad” photo. You can’t see how many friends other people have, so it’s impossible to compare your popularity to other people. If you’re concerned about privacy, you have the option to turn your location to private when you post, and you get a notification if someone screenshots your picture.
And maybe the best part: there are no advertisements and no influencers - just me and my family and friends celebrating the mundane aspects of our lives. Because everyday life is important and beautiful.
We should be real more often.
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