Social Media on a Human Scale

The Scroll is Finite

A few weeks ago, my friend Selena started lobbying our group chat to join BeReal. BeReal is yet another social media app in an endless sea – “But this one’s different!” Selena supplicated. She made appeals directed at my distrust of social media. “I think it’s the perfect social media app for you. You can’t binge it, you can’t scroll endlessly. You check it once and you’re done!”

The way BeReal works is that it pings you once during the day – at different times each day – and prompts you to take a photograph of whatever is in front of you as well as a selfie to match the moment. (The selfie part threw me off the first time; I wasn’t expecting that!) Ideally, your friends all take photos at the same moment, giving you a window into their lives.

One of Selena’s arguments to get me to join BeReal was telling me how she felt like it really was bringing her closer to her friends, because it was showing her parts of their lives that she wouldn’t normally see. Along with a handful of friends from the group chat, I decided to give it a try.

“Isn’t it fun?” Selena asked me a few days after I joined. Hrm. I wasn’t so sure. At first, being on the app gave me anxiety. I waited for the singsong ping to alert me that it was time and then, when it got too late, wondered why it hadn’t happened yet. Easily afflicted by FOMO, I didn’t want to miss out on anything, but I also didn’t need yet another reason to be focused on my phone; I had too many of those already. I told Selena that I wasn’t sure I was going to stick around on the app for very long.

But a few weeks in, my relationship with the app has softened. It doesn’t occupy a huge part of my brain, although I’m usually happy to hear the ping trill from my phone.

I have found myself thinking at times – I wish BeReal would ping right now! It’s that old feeling of “I’m doing something interesting and I want to show the world,” a feeling I recall from the days when I was more active on social media. A beautiful sunset! A fancy dinner! A cool event! The picture perfect moments, but none of the mundane ones.

I appreciate that BeReal doesn’t let you choose the moment. If you adhere to the rules of taking a photo when you hear the ping, you’re not always going to be doing something Instagram-worthy. And that’s okay.

Chaotic dinner with my toddlers. Working at my desk. Driving in my car. Cutting apple slices to be dehydrated. Reading a book to my son at the playground. Sitting on the back deck surrounded by fall foliage. Nursing my son on the couch while my preschooler plays in my bed. These are some of the moments that I’ve shared with my friends.

And through my friends’ BeReal photos, I’ve been able to observe the moment when Destry sits on the floor in her living room after the kids are both in bed, enjoying a quiet respite after a hectic day of child-rearing. I’ve been able to join Selena at fancy work events and hanging out with her fellow paramedics in the breakroom between emergency calls. I’ve seen the way light changes outside Rose’s huge kitchen windows at different times of day. I’ve been in the checkout line at the mall with Jess and in her bathroom when she’s helping her toddler brush his teeth. I get to see them at work and at rest, in between places and in their happy places. (We joke that, if we only had BeReal photos to go by, we might think that all Destry does with her life is read books in bed – not a bad life!)

The truth is, I’m a people person. I think that’s why I love social media, because it gives me unfettered access to people and their lives. Of course, most of the people whose lives I see on social media are not people who I care about or even know in real life. I get fed whatever the algorithm decides is the stickiest content to keep me scrolling. These are not friends sharing windows into their lives; these are creators sharing “content” they’ve spent a lot of time and energy crafting.

I have four friends that I follow on BeReal and I have curtailed my impulse to add a million more. It feels intimate, like a small dinner party of close friends, as opposed to the ‘stadium full of strangers’ vibe in my Instagram feed.

Jess reminds me that this is the rub when it comes to any social media app, and she’s right. You’re interactions on an app all depend on how many people you let into your feed. Basically, any social media app can feel intimate if you’re intentional about it.

For an extrovert like me, I started using Facebook as a digital Rolodex, (Remember those? My mom still uses hers.) adding people that I only met for a few hours at a hostel and have never seen again. Twenty years later, I can tell you what their cats look like and what their kids dressed up as for Christmas. Then there are the endless accounts that populate my feed that I never personally chose to follow, the ones that the algorithm has chosen for me. With apps like Instagram and Facebook, there’s the issue of the never-ending scroll, an infinite sea of memes and reels that make your head spin.

But for me, BeReal is social media at its most minimal, at a level that brings me joy rather than filling me with feelings of overwhelm and emptiness.

And Selena was right. The app has made me feel closer to these four friends. In the comment section under the day’s photos, we leave silly emojis and ask each other questions. “What book are you reading?” “Ooo what are you baking?” “Is that an animal print tablecloth???”

These friends of mine, they all live far away. We don’t see each other regularly, and we might not even talk that often. We’re living very different lives. But once a day, we get to connect with each other across the many miles and share a moment of our life. It’s social media made human again.

🧹Housekeeping

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