Encounter with the real
If there were a "true self," would you really need "tips" for "tapping into it"? In this article, social psychologist Matthew Baldwin offers an overview of the concept of "authenticity" with that aim in mind. Authenticity and alienation usually come hand in hand. No one worries about "being real" unless they find themselves at a loss to explain their own behavior to themselves, they are caught up in compulsions or believe that are doing things they really don't want to be doing, acting in ways that are false to their own idealized version of themselves.
The discourse around "authenticity" steps in to intensify and normalize these problems under the guise of assuaging them. This is why it is especially appealing to marketers. If one understands oneself in terms of what one lacks, then one can continually be sold things that seem to fill that void but inevitably fail.
Baldwin suggests replacing "authenticity" with the concept of "fluency," which sounds a bit like the concept of "flow" — when you forget yourself in moments of mastery of some practice, you feel more "authentic." Another way of putting that is that people feel most authentic when they are thinking about themselves the least, which implies that the best way to be authentic is to stop self-consciousness altogether. To "be real" one needs to be an object and not a subject.
Who you "really are" can only be accessed by bypassing your conscious mind, by capturing your acts and not their premeditation, by reflecting you back to yourself in an image or an algorithmically generated set of results: the For You Page as "knowing you better than you know yourself" because self-knowledge has been deauthenticated from the start. Anything I think I know about myself should be understood as a lie I've generated to hide the authentic truth about myself from myself — "thinking" is, from this perspective, not the self. Meanwhile, algorithms reflect objective knowledge produced from behavioral data: "the real me."
It follows that apps will help us get in touch with our authentic self the more they prevent us from thinking. Algorithmic recommendation is one angle on this; the app BeReal, which has garnered some media attention recently as the "un-Instagram," is another. This is how the app describes its gimmick: "Everyday at a different time, everyone is notified simultaneously to capture and share a Photo in 2 Minutes. A new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life." If Instagram shows people posing, at their most calculating and self-aggrandizing, then BeReal will aim to catch people by surprise and compel them to reveal themselves, to confess their true selves by giving them no time to plan out their self-representation. Deinhibition as "authenticity," with the added bonus for platforms that you are posting more routinely and not only when you have something you think is worth sharing. (Care about me at my most boring, the app allows us to say, and believe that people actually do.)
The presumption is that people need to be tricked into revealing their true selves, and that this truth is what everyone actually wants access to, and not the consciously prepared self with which one ordinarily conducts oneself in society. By this logic, an even more real version of BeReal would just give your friends access to your cameras without you knowing it, so they can peep in on you and see how you act when you think no one is watching. If the panoptic gaze is falsifying us, only voyeurism sets us free?
BeReal is apparently catching on among college students for the time being, but that isn't because it intrinsically requires more authenticity from users. They will eventually learn how to game its system to present themselves competitively. It may be that new social apps gain traction because it is fun for people, especially people launching on a new phase in their lives, to have a pretense for rebooting their friends list. A good way to "be real" is to rethink who you want to know about your life and fantasize about actually having control over it.