Be Real and the Ephemeral: In Search of Authenticity in Social Media.
How is a person supposed to prove that he is authentic? Anyone who now thinks that thoughts and feelings, values and actions, inner convictions and external behavior have to be in harmony – is absolutely right and at the same time proves that one’s own socialization happened in a time without the pressure of social media.
The experienced cosmetic surgeon Werner Mang pointed out the “Instagram madness” in his current book. In the past ten years, the need for operations has increased significantly, and even children and young people seek advice from him. His finding: Social media are promoting a “new obsession with beauty.”
The new “Bold Glamour” filter on the Tiktok platform, which is also very popular in Germany, has recently been going through the roof as a drug for the addiction to a beautiful face (cf. FR7 of March 25). In the first few weeks, around 17 million portraits were transformed into a western ideal of beauty. This is much cheaper than an operation, but there is still no investigation into how deep the fall is when a permanently filtered smile pulls the corners of the mouth down again in the mirror of truth.
Another way to sum it up is as a neuroscientific team from the University of North Carolina published earlier this year. The group studied 169 adolescents for three years and explored how the social platforms Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook affect social behavior. “Young people who use social media regularly are more sensitive to expected social feedback. Adolescents without social media become more independent of the judgment of others over time,” wrote co-author Maria Maza on Twitter.
A study by the Rheingold Salon, which determined this in 100 in-depth interviews and 3060 online questionnaires with 14 to 22-year-olds at the end of the pandemic, sheds light on what “constant use” of social media means. According to this, there is a close connection between the time the smartphone is used and the fear of being excluded from the social reference group. Post picture, count likes, reinforce behavior and post new picture – or delete old picture. Some of those examined stated that they do this eight to nine hours a day – even during school hours. Social media is taking self-improvement to the extreme.
No movement without countermovement. Anyone who now thinks of walks and personal conversations – is absolutely right again, is possibly a supporter of “digital detox” (data detoxification sounds more elegant, but of course the antonym to the rejected cool must itself be hip) and proves again on the walk that he is in a generation that did not yet have mobile phones. Today the smartphone is always on. Just always. So really always, unless the battery is empty – but at that moment nobody would rather be with a young person.
So by that logic, apps can only be contained with apps. And for the first time – of course – a smartphone application for social media did that. Snapchat popularized the self-destruct mechanism. Anyone who registers does not create a profile to this day. Every picture or video sent to friends disappears after a certain period of time. In addition, granddaughters or nephews are informed if grandpa or aunt try to save the cute picture as a screenshot.
The really sensational happens through the fleeting, the disappearing, the ephemeral – namely, nothing. Even if the everyday is staged and carries the phenomenon of the spectacle like a firework display – it is only a snapshot. When Theodor W. Adorno wrote this down in his aesthetic theory in 1974, he had a basic human need in mind, but at the same time anticipated an escape from the stimulus-response spiral of the Internet. The ephemeral, the complete disappearance, is a longing that not only Zen masters cultivate at the end of their lives – it is becoming the most important human ability in the digital world.
The big players quickly copied and perverted this mechanism. Shortly after Snapchat was founded, Facebook and Instagram offered a new feature: Stories. In addition to permanently lingering content and ever more enriched profiles, the registered persons can also publish disappearing things there. The curse of this fugitive, however, is that it no longer has any authenticity when platforms simultaneously promote the total staging of Western-colonized ideals of beauty.
That is why an anti-network has been taking the last step for a few years now. Be Real was developed by former employees of a fun sports camera company. Two images can be published once a day. These must be taken unembellished within a maximum of two minutes by the front-facing and rear-facing cameras. Filters are impossible, as is access to saved and edited recordings. And of course the photos diffuse after 14 hours in data nirvana.
So is the ephemeral ugliness of everyday life finally digitally capturing the authentic? Critics point out that many young people at Be Real cannot deal with the fact that recordings not only show a funny facial expression, but also reveal the untidy apartment, the position of minors or give strangers insights that can lead to abuse.
Perhaps, it is to be feared, the digital will have to go back to the beginning of the analogue, where authentic was still defined as the harmony of … If you can still remember the beginning of this text, you are lost anyway. At least for some digital appropriation. You’ll soon forget the fleeting rest anyway.
