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The Future of our Socials and our Socials of the Future

Social media apps are released almost constantly. Only every few years does one take off and enter popular use.

So what makes them make it?

Whilst our favourite apps are prone to multiple updates and changes (some becoming almost unrecognisable from their original blueprint) the popular apps largely remain unchanging. There are a select number of social media that most people are assumed to have.

The number of ‘social medias’ are actually very few considering the sheer number of people that use them every day. One or more of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat is pretty much a given for anyone with a smartphone to have. Expanding slightly further, Reddit, Tumblr, and Pinterest accounts are also common – but even when we really go niche, the number of ruling social media is in single digits.

There is a sort of social media monopoly, with the main apps making it difficult for new ones to break into the market. Everything you would need social media for seems to already be covered by the ruling few.

However, in 2022, Alexis Barreyat managed to create an app that broke into popular consciousness. As of May 2022, BeReal reported the highest number of downloads out of any social media in the United States, where the app was downloaded over 2.7 million times. The story was similar in the United Kingdom and Europe. Passed on through pretty much word of mouth only, unique visitors of BeReal climbed and downloads soared. The app was somehow perfect. With an almost perfect split between male and female posters (unlike other apps), and its age demographic perfectly spanning the demographic for general social media users – it managed to break into the ruling social media.

But what makes an app become popular? A mixture of a concept capitalising on context. TikTok, for example, did this perfectly in 2020 and has reaped the benefits in the years since. In a moment where people were bored, disconnected, and disheartened, the app provided content from strangers all over the world in an endless, perfectly curated stream of videos to entertain the user.

BeReal has monopolised on a contemporary moment that is prizing genuine connections, authentic posting, and more private and exclusive sharing circles. Launched in 2020, it wasn’t until trends of authenticity and a casual online presence allowed it to make its way out of obscurity.

Instagram, the most popular of the most similar apps as a photo-sharing platform, has changed completely since its first version. Users are becoming alienated due to the way app creators are pushing for the app to be used. The original profile design, however, was built to being able to create a scrapbook-like diary of photos. Despite the app now pushing adverts, reels, a shopping section, and accounts of influencers or brands, the app’s original purpose was to share photos with friends.

From the changing purpose of Instagram has come the ‘Instagram Influencer’, a well-known and often highly fruitful career path where one can earn money from paid ads or partnerships awarded because of a desirable personal brand and posts. Instagram has become a marketplace where users market themselves, their lives, products, or all three.

However, there is currently a shift in contemporary culture being reflected in social media. In response to heavy photoshopping, dishonesty about cosmetic procedures, and living a faked lifestyle for posts, (you can hire a fake private jet studio in LA), there are heightening pressures on influencers to be imperfect rather than perfect. The majority of content consumers praise authenticity over aesthetics, which goes against their original reason for fame. People are starting to follow ‘real’ rather than ‘desirability’. Imperfect and unposed content showing, and even highlighting ‘flaws’ is much more preferred at the moment to a perfect, airbrushed, posed picture.

In a nostalgic attempt to return Instagram to its original model, many users are creating private ‘finstas’ with a select number of followers to whom they post and share candidly and authentically. These accounts are very similar to the first uses and profiles of Instagram with casual and frequent, uncalculated, posts that highlight amusement and fun over appearances or a personal brand. This is in direct response to the way that Instagram has become a personal business-building platform. On a similar note, candid, creative, and casual posting through the ‘photo carousel’ feature (where you can include several pictures in one ‘post) has been coined ‘photo dump’ in popular vernacular. They usually feature unposed and seemingly random photos of the user’s recent life with the aim to be more authentic. They often feature stylised shots, art, views, and random, out-of-context pictures. They move away from Instagram as a personal marketplace and move it towards more of a visual diary of moments and memories. Of course, the series is carefully created to appear random, but the nature of Instagram means it is difficult to be completely uncalculated about posts – after all, posts are permeant to your profile and the perception of you and your unavoidable ‘brand’.

So, in came Be Real.

Unable to edit, share, or make posts permanent, Be Real is a direct response to the falseness and curatedness that is unavoidably projected on other social media. A personal brand or perception cannot be created because you don’t have a profile. Your previous posts are only available to you as memories. There are no adverts, no brands, no ‘likes’, and no celebrities; the app encourages a small circle of friends because it requires you to be as authentic as possible.

It is a direct response to the way users began using other photo-sharing platforms.

BeReal’s success has been proved through the main apps trying to take a chunk of the market. Like clockwork, existing apps try to assimilate the desirable features of the newcomers. YouTube shorts and Instagram reels were a direct response to TikTok’s success and the same has happened with BeReal. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have all released filters that show the view of the front and back camera, but the essence of the apps means they cannot absorb and incorporate the main premise of BeReal.

So…what next? The best way to predict the next social media is to look at what existing users of existing apps are trying to morph them into, and what apps are losing popularity.

Many people have tried to create apps using a similar premise to BeReal. One app encouraged users to take photos throughout the day, and then at a certain random point, they are all published for the next 24 hours. This incorporates the appeal of the ‘photo dump’ movement. I believe that the next big social media will use this idea of multiple posts– taking inspiration from the popularity of TikTok video compilations, private stories, Instagram photo dumps, and finsta/spam accounts.

The next social media will undoubtedly prioritise authenticity and remove likes, maybe, like BeReal, it will require photos to only be taken and posted in-app to avoid over-curation and editing. But is photo editing and curation a wholesome, artistic movement? Social media is being used for more artistic purposes. Gen Z is using Instagram as a sort of visual diary and BeReal doesn’t lend itself to this – maybe there is a gap here. There is real photography and skill in some of the pictures we see in photo dumps and some even make the carousel all blend into one continuous, tapestry-like slideshow with photos and moments merging into each like a memory or dream. BeReal fulfils its main function but doesn’t allow for creativity beyond this, unlike Instagram. The next social media will probably take influence from both BeReal and Instagram and combine them somehow into an artistic, journal-like platform.

I also believe we will see friends being able to post on friends’ profiles. Candid pictures rather than posed are seen a lot in Instagram dumps, especially using IPhone’s 0.5 lens that adds a comedic, unserious tone. Perhaps this scrapbook-esque social media will allow people to post on each other’s profiles.

I believe it will also use the idea of time-capsuling or storing pictures for a certain amount of time before they can be looked at, taking inspiration from the idea of film cameras that are becoming popular for this very reason.

Documenting moments without being overly concerned with the appearance of the photo until after the moment is a conscious movement from Gen Z who have grown up bound to calculating, re-taking, and examining their photos and videos.