Being Real
By Sarah Soltis, First Things.
It’s Sunday afternoon in the dining hall. My fellow college students line long tables for lunch after church. Amid the chatter and laughter, phones chime from multiple corners. Students throughout the hall trade silverware for phones, and pose to snap a selfie.
They’re taking pictures for BeReal—my generation’s social media platform of choice, even at a Christian college. BeReal claims to offer a “new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life.” Every day at a random time, the app prompts users to take and share a photo, using both the front and back camera. The random photo prompts are supposed to encourage “authenticity” rather than a carefully curated social media presence, which networks like Instagram and Facebook foster.
My generation senses that these older forms of social media have failed to facilitate authenticity; research continues to show that they severely affect young people’s mental health. BeReal is Generation Z’s response to the polished, perfect “timeline.”
All forms of social media, including BeReal, attempt to satisfy our human desire for genuine contact—that is, our unwitting sense that it is “not good for man to be alone”—through supposed self-expression. We know that discovering the self, as Charles Taylor wrote in Multiculturalism, occurs not in isolation but community: “I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.” Human habit propels us to plot and narrate our days, selves, and times in hopes of achieving the connection and community God formed us for, but our secular society particularly encourages us to craft our own versions of our selves and display such self-creation far and wide—for our self-creations must, we feel, be negotiated and affirmed. Social media testifies to our inborn intuition that identity is communal, but ultimately twists our communal, dialogical nature toward the end of self-creation.
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