My frightful selfie on app that salutes imperfection

THE first time I heard of Instagram was about ten years ago while staying with a group of fiftysomething friends. Someone asked if I knew about this fun app where you share pictures under a nickname and write a witty caption. It didn’t sound that compelling to me, but I was eager to see what they were talking about so I joined with a private account.

Now I regard the app very differently. Professionally, I’m judged by my audience size. How many people follow me, how much attention I can attract. Over the past decade, Instagram has increasingly become big business – influencers can make millions by amassing large followings – and it has drifted away from being just a place to post snaps for friends to see.

Even so, I’ve still enjoyed being able to peer into the lives of both those I know personally and those I don’t. Or at least I did until very recently, when Instagram changed its algorithm. To compete with arch rival TikTok, the powers that be at Instagram decided the app should prioritise videos over images when deciding what to show users as we scroll through our feeds.

Now the whole thing is a nightmare. I’m fed an endless stream of posts by people I have no interest in, complete with noisy videos which wake my bedmate up at night when I sneak a peek at my feed. Other Instagram users complain that their posts have slipped so far down the new pecking order that their followers never see them.

Meta (Instagram’s owner) has reportedly backtracked on the changes but I’m still getting far too many women showing me ways to tuck in my shirt to a Dua Lipa soundtrack for my taste. But the damage has been done and there’s now a new kid on the block: Be Real. It’s a social-media app like Instagram and TikTok, but the difference is it’s designed as an antidote to the careful presentation of our lives where pictures and videos are scrubbed up and edited through various filters.

All Be Real followers are notified simultaneously at an unpredictable two-minute time slot and asked to post whatever they are doing right there and then. The random timing of this call to action makes it hard to construct a post showing a perfect existence (most people can’t have a gorgeous tablescape ready at all times, or appear in flawless make-up all day). The whole point is to be impromptu.

In the interests of research, I tried it out and had to post a hideous selfie with no time to even brush my hair and a snap of my messy desk.

Looking at the app, the majority of posts were similarly mundane. A friend went to a party last week and reported a moment where half the guests suddenly stopped, like in a children’s game of musical statues, and brought out their phones to upload their ‘Be Real moment’.

For many of us less in thrall to social media, that doesn’t sound so appealing. I doubt I’ll use Be Real again. However, for a generation who have been brought up to feel that their place in the world is judged by their social media persona, Be Real is an exciting new toy precisely because it captures the messy imperfection of real life, accepts that people and places rarely look pretty and encouragers its users to record a moment they have no control over.