It's a bit like in the film
Jean de Florette
, when the character played by Gérard Depardieu has only one idea in mind: "Cultivate authenticity."
On the networks, and in particular on Instagram, the atmosphere is now with more raw, more spontaneous images, far from the traditional worked shots giving to see a dreamed and fantasized life.
Personalities like the top Bella Hadid (52 million subscribers) thus post images that seem less controlled (the model sometimes shows herself in tears), even “failed” (OK, she remains hot).
And the hashtag nofilter (“no filter”) has 287 million posts.
Authenticity, proximity to one's followers, is now becoming a way of standing out from ultra-retouched news feeds,
fake
(“fake”) – which abound on Instagram.
Read alsoTikTok, new giant of digital influence: chronicle of a "made in China" frenzy
If originally this social network was just a simple photo uploading application (bought in 2012 for 1 billion dollars by Mark Zuckerberg), it has become, in ten years, the alpha and omega of the good taste and influence in terms of image.
And, incidentally, the most powerful aesthetic formatting mechanism in the social world.
After Snapchat, landed in 2011 and adopted by teenagers to exchange cash with each other, a new player has taken power against the dictatorship of perfectly smooth life: TikTok.
With its wacky, quirky and LOL content, the Chinese short video app has established itself as a leader in the 12-25 age group in just two years.
In the first quarter of 2022, according to statistics provided by ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), the
app is even approaching one billion users worldwide.
TikTok is the place where you put yourself on the stage without artifice, with a sense of the shift, even of the ridiculous, relatively absent from Instagram.
Even if, it is true, with its default feature that automatically smoothes your skin by 30%, virtual reality is still far from “real life”.
The end of the fake?
So, all authentic online?
Vincent Manilève, blogger specializing in digital uses and author of the book
YouTube behind the screens
(Éditions Lemieux, 2018), weighs: “On social networks, it is
relatable
content , that is to say with which we can identify. , which are valued.
But when intimacy is an editorial line, authenticity becomes a marketing value.”
Which is monetized, as is the case with influencers.
But where does sincerity begin in a universe where everything is calibrated?
Full screen
A selfie without filter but not without pleasure.
Shutterstock/David Angelini
Born with a smartphone in hand, Gen Z learned to outsmart network codes.
Instagram, like Facebook, is becoming outdated.
Latest arrival in this era of “self-storytelling”?
The BeReal social network, whose promise is: “Your friends for real.”
Launched in 2020 by two French people who went to Xavier Niel's school 42, Kévin Perreau and Alexis Barreyat (a former GoPro employee), this application has been a hit for several months in the United States, especially on American campuses, where, ironically in history, it all started for Facebook.
The height of chic, it has been dubbed by the
New York Times
"the most boring but nice social media of the moment".
Boring ?
BeReal is above all the anti-Insta.
No filter or likes system.
BeReal will not make you known or famous, if you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram
The idea is simple: every day at a variable time, subscribers from the same community of friends receive a notification telling them to share their activity at the moment T. Result, each member must post in less than two minutes a photo of him, before she disappeared.
Objective ?
A cliche without fuss or fussy staging.
Cécile, 27, social media manager in a museum, discovered the network two months ago, and she loves: “BeReal, it's normal life, what!
I use it everyday.
There's a game side when we all get the notification, we get into it, and we can't wait to see what others are doing at the same time.
The image we post always includes a selfie and a view of what we are doing… But we can tell a lot of things with just two images.”
what
loves Cécile above all, it's the little time spent daily on the app: no need to think or plan posts, it's the snapshot that takes precedence.
Even if a function exists to post your photo later, make a
late
as we say in the jargon.
True friends...
In France, 40% of 16-25 year olds spend between 3 and 5 hours a day on social networks (source Diplomeo/BDM 2022).
BeReal's idea is to go back to the root of social networks: connecting friends instantly.
Moreover, the description of the application on the App Store displays the color: "BeReal will not make you known or
famous
, if you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”
Last April, the app was installed by more than 7 million Internet users (source Apptopia).
And the start-up of the two little French people, not even in their thirties, raised more than 30 million dollars in 2021. The only concern is monetization.
Because the application is ad-free and, in a digital world governed by the "attention economy", the short time spent online could be a problem.
Vincent Manilève is not surprised by the success of this “ordinary social network”: “The persona that we create for ourselves on social networks always needs another, less calibrated space to express itself. .”
From BeReal to TikTok, long live “authentoc”, then.