CS-304 Blog #1Icebreaker -Are you really being real?

 Hello everyone, my name is Angela Petrova. I am a third-year communications major. Currently the social media app “BeReal”  has recently skyrocketed in popularity among teenagers and young adults. It was created in 2020 by two French entrepreneurs Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau. The app essentially works by sending users a randomly timed notification once a day and then giving them two minutes to take a photograph simultaneously with the front and back camera. This is meant to encourage individuals to communicate with their friends or others what real life actually looks like rather than seeing another staged and filtered picture as they would on other platforms. 

This app tries to encourage individuals to show off their authentic lifestyle and embrace that sometimes life may not always be as how it is portrayed online. By displaying this image its ultimate goal is to dismiss today's dominant influencer culture. The app was meant to make people feel comfortable doing mundane activities such as laying around in bed doing nothing, and show that one’s peers are doing the same thing because everyday life isn't always as exciting as it seems. 

Today's social media culture has become very toxic as many individuals only post to show off the fun that they are having to seem cooler and superior to their peers rather than genuinely wanting to share an experience. With this many individuals communicate that one's life must be fun, exciting, and always on the move for it to be “postable”. What I find interesting is that although this app's main purpose is to de-rail individuals from the very toxic social media culture, many still find ways to stage their postings. Many people have noticed that you can still post later on as long as you do not open the notification when it's sent. This ultimately dismisses the app’s main goal of trying to portray people’s more authentic lifestyle, many still try to comply with the norms of the artificial online life. 

Comments

  1. Lydia G.September 26, 2022 at 3:40 PM

    Hi Angela! I recently downloaded the app BeReal in July, it kept being brought up in my friend group and we thought of how fun and different it could be. At first it was all fun and jokes until I started adding more people who I was not as close to, it became something I had to think about before posting. Today when it went off I was in class so I avoided it, then later in the day I still didn't want to post because I didn't feel as if I looked okay enough to post my face. I haven't thought about your idea of this app also becoming a toxic platform until now, every social media app or platform that became popular for being fun have turned into a place that puts pressure on people to make your life seem so much better than it really is. BeReal also has the option to react back to your friends' photos which I would say is where the pressure also comes out since you want as many reactions as you can get. I really hope the app doesn't try to add or change it to make it something that it didn't start as, like Snapchat started reels.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post #4: Applying McLuhan's Hot and Cool Theory to Podcasting

Image
  Hi everyone!  For this blog post, I am interested in outlining Marshall Mcluhan’s Hot and Cool media theory. In particular, this post will use his theory to dissect the similarities and differences between how radio and podcasting are typically consumed in contemporary culture. Ultimately, the goal of this post is to illustrate how modern-day podcasting’s technological affordances allow for a more cool communicative method in comparison to traditional radio broadcasting.   McLuhan's Hot and Cool media theory categorizes different media forms based on how the receiver experiences its content. Specifically, for McLuhan, different media forms demand varying degrees of audience participation which impacts how one extracts meaning. Hot media is largely defined by its “high definition” as it focuses on one singular sense (ex: auditory, visual, etc). This intensification of a single sense facilitates the demand of a viewer’s attention as it does not leave much context to ...
Read more

The Freedom Convoy as Hot or Cool Media / Zach Tyrrell

A prominent idea in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media is looking at media as either hot or cold. Hot media demands a viewer's attention whereas cold media requires conscious participation by the medium’s consumer. Examples of hot media include; photographs, print, and radio. On the contrary cold media includes the; telephone, seminars and television. To reiterate, the differentiating factor between the two is audience involvement.  The freedom convoy took the nation by storm in early 2022. As most of you probably know, the freedom convoy was a nationwide protest against the vaccine mandate instituted by Trudeau’s government. The convoy made its way to Ottawa as hundreds protested outside of the Parliament building for a number of weeks. So, is the freedom convoy hot or cold media? I personally feel that it is difficult to categorize the convoy as one or the other which therefore makes it a combination of both. As we know hot media demand’s a viewer's attention a...
Read more

Blog Post #5

Image
Hi everyone!  Before I answer this week’s blog prompt, I want to establish a few key points of McLuhan’s medium theory in order to predict how he would interpret social media as a communicative medium. As we have discussed in our class, McLuhan’s approach to interpreting different media forms focuses on how they construct a social environment that can vary the meaning and sense of the information that is being communicated. Particularly, McLuhan explains that a medium can be seen as an extension of our human senses. This causes different media to favour certain senses which influences how we interpret meaning within the barriers of that sense. For example, since radio privileges the sense of hearing, this then causes receivers of its message to perceive its message within the limitations of hearing. Thus, this idea of media as an extension of human senses has certain implications regarding how different media can shape our social environments and cultural communicative practices....
Read more