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Image: Bianca Cross
Image: Bianca Cross

InternetApril 21, 2022

Will BeReal solve all our social media woes?

Image: Bianca Cross
Image: Bianca Cross

The much-hyped new social platform focused on authenticity promises to herald the future of social media – just like every other app before it. For IRL, Shanti Mathias checks out what all the fuss is about. 

A slight double chin, a tangle of cords across a plain white desk, a close encounter with my optional approach to hair brushing, vague natural light, the sparkly shoulders of a shirt my mum’s friend gave me. I examine the photographs. I am nearly out of time, an urgency in the haptic vibrations of the two-minute countdown.

I press send, and wait to be perceived by my three friends. I am trying to be real. Specifically, I am trying BeReal, the social media app which promises, ominously, to help you discover “who your friends really are”. 

Every couple of months it seems a new social media app is heralded as the Next Big Thing and the Future of the Internet. As a person who spent far too much time online even before I was obligated to do so for my job, I remember the early trend pieces about TikTok and the hubbub around Clubhouse early in the pandemic. Further back, I remember when Snapchat was something my friend’s brother was explaining to me on a dusty afternoon in early high school, when Curious Cat statuses filled the Facebook account I’d begged my mum to be allowed, mindlessly mimicking Vines at lunchtime and hoping that imitation was the same as being funny, writing melodramatic goodbyes to internet friends I’d met on Google Buzz in the last hours before Google closed the platform. 

Using BeReal reminded Shanti Mathias that her life was pretty mundane.

And so it was with the recollection of these social networks of yore, their early moments and often, their endings, that I downloaded BeReal, the latest social media platform du jour.

How does the knowledge of a new social media app arrive in your brain? I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I heard about BeReal, but suddenly there were at least ten articles about it, and cooler people than me were mentioning it online, so I decided to do what intrepid internet journalists have been doing for many years: try a vaguely hyped app, contribute to the hype myself, and hope it all means something. Become a guinea pig, bleeding (metaphorically) on the altar of content. 

BeReal works like this: once a day, at a random moment, the app sends you a notification. Within two minutes of receiving the notification, you take a picture with both your front and back facing cameras. You post the picture. If you post it late, you’re labelled as having done so. If you haven’t posted your BeReal, you can’t see your friends’ posts.

There are comments and, terrifyingly, custom photo emoji reactions, but no way to direct message others, no way to share posts, no likes, no ads (yet), no followers (like Facebook, friends must be mutual). These features are supposed to help circumvent the problems of other social media platforms. With only two minutes, posts can’t be ultra prepared and posed. With only one notification a day, the app is not constantly humming and distracting. Without followers – and free, so far, of sponcon – there is no doomscrolling, no envy of other people’s lives; just people you already know, doing ordinary things.

While BeReal did not respond to requests for comment about their operation in New Zealand, they did provide a fact sheet where they describe themselves as “an authentic, spontaneous, and candid social network”. 

For a social platform to become popular, people need to know about it. When I opened BeReal, which accesses your contacts to show you which people you already know are on the app, I found three familiar faces: my avant-garde, trendy cousin Ollie and my avant-garde, trendy co-workers Josie and Bianca. This is to say that – in New Zealand at least – the app is not overly populated, and it relies on other social platforms for people to discover it. 

“My friend found it on TikTok and told us all to download it,” says Ollie, the aforementioned trendy cousin. He’s been using it for several weeks, and especially likes getting glimpses of life from friends overseas. “Sometimes it makes me want to message them on another app,” he says. 

“I don’t post much on my other social media because I get too nervous about how good the post is,” says Bianca, The Spinoff’s social media editor, who also heard about the app on TikTok. “I think it’s really chaotic that you could have a really crazy day full of events and you don’t get the BeReal notification until you’re home on the couch.”

While “visible to friends only” is the default mode, BeReal also lets you scroll through users from around the world who have chosen to post publicly. This gives me a sense of the company’s global demographic, which is extremely young: a teenager in Mexico does homework, two roommates in the US smoke matching vapes, a young woman in France takes a picture of a sticker encrusted laptop on a rumpled bedspread. It’s a window into the deeply ordinary lives of people I will never know; less intrusive than happily boring. 

One of the joys of a new social app – from the company’s perspective, at least – is that in the glowy haze of early popularity and $30 million of capital funding, there is freedom from the media scrutiny and public perceptions endured by the well-established digital giants: consider the reams of content generated by a change in Google privacy policy or a indication of Mark Zuckerberg’s political leanings

Perhaps social media has made me cynical, but I wonder what BeReal does with the phone numbers of its five million users, and whether the emoji feature (to react to a friend’s picture, you use a photo of your own face) generates information about the emotional state of thousands of people, which could expose users to emotional manipulation à la Facebook in 2014. 

To react to a BeReal post, you use custom emojis: cute personalisation or sinister data harvesting?

There’s no link to the privacy policy in the interface of the app, which is found in small print at the bottom of the website. The policy itself says that the company will store your files and location data for up to three years after you stop using the app; I think, sadly, of years from now, when BeReal will retain graven images of my dumb face while I retain no memory of writing this article.

That said, to my non-expert eye, the company’s location in France – where it’s held to the standards of the EU’s GDPR privacy legislation – means its privacy policy and terms of service are no more egregious than other social media companies. At this point, private corporations having access to our personal lives via the shiny devices we all clutch has been thoroughly normalised. 

The assumption of BeReal is that your most authentic self can be found spontaneously, when your phone is nearby. “The notion of ‘authenticity’ is actually highly curated and constructed, which can mask the fact that interactions on social media platforms are always mediated in some way,” says Michael Daubs, a senior lecturer in media studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He says that people construct identities online by suggesting that their online presence is a real reflection of their life, “which social media platforms then take advantage of”. The BeReal app certainly trades in this currency of authenticity.

But maybe it’s not that deep. “It’s a bit of a gimmick, there’s nothing much to it,” says Ollie, who often finds himself overthinking other social platforms like Instagram. That gimmick is clever and unique, though it remains to be seen whether it has lasting power. “I don’t think it’ll last more than a couple of months,” Ollie tells me.

As for me, I’m not sure if I want my three BeReal friends to know how ordinary my life feels: reading books, reading screens, feeling full of ideas I can’t articulate. But around the world, millions of people are willing to be perceived, yet another fun little reason to pick up your phone. The trendy young things of Aotearoa (myself included, I guess) are determined not to be left behind. 

Keep going!
Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

InternetApril 20, 2022

The rise and fall of ‘Karen’

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Once a sick burn used to describe a specific type of person, ‘Karen’ has become meaningless. As part of an IRL miniseries on how the internet shapes our use of language, Madeleine Holden tracks the lifecycle of a once-great meme. 

My first inkling that “Karen” was on life support came early last year, when I walked the Northern Circuit in late summer. Arriving at sunset to the Oturere Hut, my hiking partner and I found ourselves bunking with 12 strangers, most of whom were middle-aged white women. Huddled around an indoor picnic bench, cradling hot chocolates, I listened as they chatted merrily among themselves. 

“I guess I’m a Karen,” one said cheerfully, before another chimed in that they “all were”. They didn’t sound unaware of the negative connotations of the term, but seemed to assume, with good-natured resignation, that it was simply their fate. 

There were no obvious signs of Karenhood among the group, though: no inverted bobs with jarring blonde highlights, no telltale weirdness around the hut’s nonwhite residents, no “I know it when I see it” vibes-based clues. Some signs suggested they were, in fact, Kims – less than an hour earlier, for example, they’d been offering around precious chocolate rations and hot drinks to total strangers. 

To be clear, I didn’t actually know these women: I had no idea how often they’d call the police on a neighbour for the crime of being brown, say, or demand the manager’s ear the second a service worker stopped catering to their every whim. But my hunch was they were wrongly conceding Karen status because the term had already become diluted through overuse, meaning they thought it was more about who you were (ie a middle-aged white woman) than how you behaved (ie like a nasty nark, who also happens to be a middle-aged white woman).

At any rate, I took good note of how far “Karen” had come. A niche meme emerging from the bowels of the mid-2010s internet in the US had exploded in popularity to the point that it was familiar, just a few years later, in the most offline space imaginable: a DOC hut with no wifi or electricity, teeming with Boomers, in a picturesque mountain wilderness in Aotearoa. 

By my reckoning, “Karen” died later that year, deep into the Coronavirus pandemic. The term died with Covid rather than from Covid, but a few months after my Northern Circuit hike, when I first noticed the insult’s reduced potency, it was clear it had become totally meaningless, and that the virus helped speed up its death. 

Here and overseas, government restrictions had become a serious point of contention among different factions of the electorate, and disagreement was heated, especially online. The Karen insult was immediately repurposed: while some degree of racism and/or bullying of service workers had always been a critical component of Karenhood, suddenly you could be a “Covid Karen” without these key ingredients. The quintessential Karen, at least according to proponents of lockdowns and social distancing mandates, was now someone who loudly opposed the (pandemic) rules, rather than demand the police or a manager enforce them. 

This meant that pretty much anyone could be accused of Karenhood: the insult became less about an essential set of noxious behaviours from a clearly identifiable character and more about having the wrong politics and vibes.

Not that it was always very clear which politics or vibes, though. Locally, both vociferous opponents of the government’s policies, and their most evangelical enforcers and cheerleaders, described the other side as “Karens”: it was Karen to write an op-ed critical of the government’s approach, protest lockdowns in the streets of Whangārei or be a Grounded Kiwi; it was also Karen to call 105 on Level 3 rulebreakers and insist the Pfizer vaccine isn’t gene therapy. New Zealanders wholeheartedly embraced the insult, even tweaking it to “Kiwi Karen”, but the term became little more than generic shit to fling at the political enemy; as precise as calling someone a “communist”, “fascist”, “dickhead” or “little bitch”. 

Dr Andreea Calude, a senior lecturer linguistics at the University of Waikato, points out that it’s totally normal for slang to shift meaning in this way. The Karen meme “represents a societal dissatisfaction with things we don’t like,” she says. “It started out as a racist thing, [but] at the moment there’s a big dissatisfaction with non-experts trying to dish out advice and say what we should be doing. This is really important and salient, so now Karen’s become that.” 

In time, she adds, there’ll be new behaviours to disapprove of, “and it’s convenient once you have a person [to blame].”

Still, insults need to be targeted to be truly cutting, and “Karen” has fast lost this quality. In its early days, “Karen” was an insult par excellence because it was so surgical: it lasered in on a uniquely awful character with a famously naff aesthetic – “right down to the haircut,” Calude says – which had, until that point, completely avoided scrutiny.

The quintessential Karen. (Image: Archi Banal)

Not just anyone could be a Karen; it wasn’t mere shorthand for “someone with a different opinion on vaccine mandates than me” or “someone I find obnoxious online”. A Karen was a relatively powerful person who feigned victimhood to win interpersonal disputes, knowing all along the cards were really in her hands; that cops and managers would automatically take her side over a service worker, say, or an eight-year-old Black girl selling bottled water. The way a Karen leveraged her status over her target was core to what made her hateable; the stripey highlights, chandelier earrings and wraparound sunglasses were what made her mockable. 

“Karen” was a sick burn once. It meant something. And now it’s carked it. 

Looking back a few years, it’s no wonder “Karen” blew up beyond recognition. The quintessential Karen was a racist, after all, and between 2015 and 2020, the antiracism movement boomed: while it had been gaining attention and approval since at least the Ferguson unrest in 2014, after George Floyd was killed in May 2020, it exploded into the mainstream. Black Lives Matter went from a Twitter hashtag to a foundation grossing more than 90 million USD in donations; consultants like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo became celebrities with lucrative careers; and corporations rolled out antiracist business strategies and public pledges of allegiance to the cause. On social media, videos capturing Karens in the wild regularly went mega-viral; the subjects were often identified and fired. 

In short, it was suddenly a very bad time to be a Karen. Her relative power levels had nosedived, and she’d never been more exposed. 

The term exploded in popularity, reaching its zenith in June 2020. And sure enough, it began plummeting immediately after. Nothing bleeds life from a trend like sustained mainstream attention, and “Karen” had reached saturation point. Dusty media outlets were running explainers, local politicians were weaponising the term and pizza chains were trialling gimmicky promos. You could even watch a whole movie based on the meme

The Karen meme exploded in popularity in mid-2020, and plummeted soon after. (Image: Google Trends/Archi Banal)

Pundits also began earnestly arguing about whether ‘Karen’ was misogynistic, another death knell for the term. “Memes are all about shared humour,” Calude points out; it’s a core part of what makes them memorable and punchy. Setting aside the question of whether “Karen” is misogynistic, nothing drains humour from a meme (or insult) like endless pontificating about whether it’s sensitive enough. 

Slang has always had a “niche → popular → overused” lifecycle, but there’s no denying that the internet has drastically intensified this process; both in the sense that terms become more popular than ever before, and get run into the ground much faster. 

The internet is a “super spreader” of information, Calude says, meaning “language changes really fast”. Because we share memes and slang in “networked communities” – social media spaces like Facebook and Twitter full of people from all spheres of our lives, from coworkers to childhood friends to strangers – slang escapes the subcultures and localities where it originates, and spreads to a huge and diverse audience, immediately. 

Calude points out that linguists used to study the evolution of language over the course of months or years; in the digital age, they’ve had to narrow their time frames to days or even hours. The edgiest slang becomes cringeworthy in a fraction of the time it used to; memes have shorter lifecycles than mayflies. 

It’s no surprise, then, that “Karen” has become a zombie; a lumbering, half-dead version of its former self. Now, halfheartedly trying to retrieve a sandwich from a thieving seagull is Karen, arguing that Elon Musk should pay more tax is Karen, having expensive taste in joinery is Karen, and loving celebrity drama is Karen. Being unprepared to talk about menstruation with a 9-year-old boy is Karen; telling a far-right reporter he’s a “fucking low-life” (while also being a man) is Karen, too. Obnoxious Formula One guys are Karens, cheeky babies are Karens, cats are Karens. 

But the classic version of the insult will live on in our memory. You were only with us a short time, “Karen”, but you were once a truly devastating burn, and you had a huge impact on us all. RIP.

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