Can We Even Be Real?
A look at emerging social media platforms and their fundamental flaw
Being a glass is half-full kind of guy, I’ve tried to look on the bright side of billionaire Elon Musk scooping up Twitter for $44 billion and turning it into his private company plaything.
But I’m faltering. Maybe it’s his constant needling tweets that intentionally attempt to pit the left against the right or nonsense about buying other brands — like Coca-Cola — and doing ridiculous things with them.
I get it, Musk likes to have his fun and until the deal is done, we really won't know what he’ll do. But I think a lot of people are beginning to assume the worst and have started looking for safer or maybe more favorable social shores elsewhere.
Recently, I heard about BeReal, an unusual social media platform with a simple premise: gathering friends together to share, once a day, all at once, what they’re doing. The secret sauce is that the app uses both your front and back camera to capture what you’re doing. Looking at the “Discovery” feed, I’m not entirely sure everyone realizes this. There are a lot of photos of laps with insets of smiling faces.
For me, BeReal is a lonely experience because I don’t have the guts to try inviting friends to yet another social media platform, especially when…
