This autumn, social networks are offering us a rather interesting journey around the world. For example there’s the Metaverse which recently celebrated its first birthday, yet is still about as densely populated as Antarctica. On the other hand, when it comes to traffic TikTok allows us to glide over a street in Beijing at rush hour, while the experience offered by Instagram resembles a souk in Marrakech: very noisy with a lot of buying and selling. Facebook, however, is a bit like a town in the Midwest becoming rapidly depopulated. What else can we look at? There’s Twitter of course which now, with Elon Musk in the cockpit, will have to go a-conquering other planets (i.e. users from totally new niches).
Perhaps you may have noticed that Europe, somewhat lethargic during the years when social media platforms were making their breakthrough, doesn’t seem to be on the map for this tour. BeReal was created in 2020 by a French team but is actually emerging at present. It allows one to share photos on a real-time basis only. A notification comes in, followed by a two-minute countdown. That’s all we get to post something. A race against the clock, reminding us of Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout: we don’t know if BeReal will outlive the present thirst for novelty, nor if it will be impervious to cloning.
But this app certainly makes one thing clear: contents need to be checked because we’re becoming more mistrusting than ever…
Perhaps our eyes have become lazy and need to slow down on this constant flirting with images and, instead, start surveying them from a sensible distance. A bird’s eye view, so to speak. Off we go…