On BeingReal

I was in a BeReal today. That was fun. Five or six of us were sacked out around my agency-provided daytime dorm room hacking away at laptops talking nonsense and lobbing one-liners while pounding out copy and content calendars. Then the notification went off and all hell broke loose.

That’s a bit much. It’s not really that all hell broke loose. But for someone who was only introduced to the app less than 24 hours earlier in a very similar formation in my office the immediate MOBILIZATION was fascinating. This was it. It was go-time.

JZ, you’re in my BeReal. I leaned in, smiled and snap. Posted. Well within the 2-minute timeframe.

This isn’t the part where I explain the card game to you. There isn’t much to explain really. The app is pretty simple. A notification randomly goes off and you’ve got 2 minutes to snap a pic (camera captures both directions) and post it. Only your friends can see it — not @electiondenier69. Apparently, unlike other social platforms people are pretty picky about who they friend. That’s it.

BeReal isn’t for me. I don’t really need to get bombarded with male-pattern baldness staring at an Excel spreadsheet for 2 minutes everyday. But, as they say…I love it for you.

The you being my early 20s amigas. In fact, I think BeReal is kind of brilliant. You see the shit. The grey cubicles. The drop ceilings. The puffy, hungover faces. The IKEA dressers. It’s all in plain sight. Front, back and snap.

I mean, I generally assume all social media is toxic and destructive. There are myriad well-supported statistics to support that. But, in the scheme of things this seems like something that wouldn’t quite make it on the Surgeon General’s radar. People can see if you tried to take multiple pictures because that’s not real. And they see how many minutes you posted after the 2 minute window because that’s not real either.

I guess in this plastic, filtered mess we’ve slid into it’s kinda cool to know that 20-some million users worldwide have this Pavlovian response to a push notification and use that 2-minutes to stare down the barrel of their cracked iPhone and say It’s time to BeReal.

Say what you want about that generation. I say they got a lot of guts.