BeReal: A Performative Panopticon

Each day, the BeReal app sends out a distinctive chime notification at a random time. “⚠️ Time to BeReal ⚠️,” it reads, “2 min left to capture a BeReal and see what your friends are up to!” Under the pressure of a ticking countdown, the user takes a photo that shows both the front and back cameras simultaneously. Then, once posted on the feed, their snapshots are stamped by the exact time they were able to take their BeReal (if they were on time). Otherwise, the app begins to call out users that posted late.

Since its unassuming release in 2020, the app has gained extreme popularity, making its way into the mainstream and weaving itself into Gen Z pop culture. Many cite BeReal’s concept as ingenious, a fresh and inventive twist on the posed perfection of modern social media. Without filters and editing, the photos taken on the app are supposed to be mundane and casual. As a testament to its popularity, the app’s concept is already being copied by many major social media platforms via TikTok’s Now, Instagram’s IG Candid (in the works), and Snapchat’s new dual camera feature.

However, despite all its attempts to be an anti–Instagram, BeReal may just be another flawed (albeit inventive) social media app. Even though the app panders to people’s desires for authentic social media, the fact is that pressures still remain on the platform, even without filters and curation. Despite the two-minute timeframe users are given to post, many still post late—some because they missed the notification, but often because people choose to wait until a later time to post when they are doing something more ‘interesting’. Within the app runs an undercurrent of a desire to have the best post—to be doing the most interesting thing, or to look the best—all while being “real.” 

TikTok has also contributed to the pressure to have an exciting BeReal, with posts proclaiming to have “won” BeReal by having the best pictures, many of these involving front-row concert views or celebrity encounters. Despite the app’s original mission to “be real,” the sense that one must post the best picture they can has overtaken the initial authenticity that the app strives to foster. 

Additionally, the app’s concept contributes to a panopticon effect among its users. Initially a hypothetical institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon was designed to enforce behavioral control among prisoners. An observation tower lies in the center of a circle of prison cells, where a guard can observe every inmate, but the inmates cannot see inside the tower. The prisoners never know when they are being observed, so the effect is that they behave at all times for fear of being watched at that moment. French philosopher Michel Foucault later developed Bentham’s prison into panopticism, a social theory about internal surveillance and discipline in society. BeReal mimics this same effect of performative behavior through its approach: because the notification could go off at any moment, each user is pressured to live an exciting life all the time because they never know when they’ll have to post their life. 

Although it arose as a fresh and exciting take on social media, human vanity and “FOMO” has turned BeReal into something more fabricated and performatively authentic. The recent ‘effortlessly natural’ trend, accentuated by curated Instagram photo dumps and no-filter posts, has turned the platform into just another social media that feeds this illusion. Social media will almost always be illusory, and it may not be the apps’ problems—but rather the users’. It is time to reexamine ourselves and our own social media tendencies and determine whether we ourselves are feeding the problem.

by JANET LIU