Raw media is the hottest thing in social today, and the platforms facilitating it — Snapchat, Periscope, Meerkat, and now Beme — are capturing the fun, weird spirit that made social fun in the first place.
Alex Kantrowitz
It's 3:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon and 1,000 hyperventilating teenagers cheer on Casey Neistat as he tries to blow a drone out of the sky with a T-shirt cannon. Neistat, a filmmaker whose fame has soared thanks to YouTube and Snapchat, is wearing his trademark sunglasses, the temples of which get lost in his curly hair. With fellow social media phenomenon Jerome Jarre and MTV Catfish host Nev Schulman standing by, Neistat launches shirt after shirt into the sky to the delight of the teens, who shriek at each near miss.
"The drone is taunting you," screams 14-year-old Joshua Cheadle in Neistat's direction.
"It wants a piece of me," Neistat replies. A friend of Cheadle's gapes in amazement. "He talked to you, man, what an honor," he says.
The event -- which Neistat announced just hours earlier -- has all the markings of an increasingly common ritual: the mobbing of social media celebrities by legions of diehard fans. Except this time, there's a twist: The teens are here for a celebration of a technology company, Beme, not simply to worship alongside fellow adherents in the cult of Casey.
And Neistat, Beme's creator, does enjoy cult celebrity status. He rose to fame by creating highly produced videos, mostly for YouTube, which are so popular scores of kids hang out near his studio in New York every day hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Beme is designed to give them a real window into his life -- and to everyone else's as well. Yet this hot new app is just a piece of a much larger trend toward raw media. If you look at today's hot networks — Snapchat, Beme, Periscope, Meerkat — they are more about immediacy and intimacy than image building. They are about passing along the moment, in an unstructured way. They're realer, grittier. Rawer.
Beme, which Neistat released last week, may be the hottest social media app on the planet right now. It's deceptively simple and decidedly weird. It lets people share four-second video clips with no option to edit, delete, or even watch onscreen as they film. It's just a black screen that blindly captures snippets and passes them on. It's also weirdly hot, due in no small part to its exclusivity. You have to be invited to join via an unlock code from Beme or another existing user. People are auctioning them off on eBay.
"I like the raw," 15-year-old Natasha Serrano says while playing with Beme. "It's more interesting."
Beme's popularity is easy to brush off as an extension of Neistat's fame, but its rise is likely part of something else, something bigger. The app is the purest version of a new generation of social media companies built for the sharing of raw, unproduced and unpolished content, a stark contrast from social media's establishment, which has been gravitating toward professional content for years. From the live-streaming apps Periscope and Meerkat to Snapchat with its Stories tab, platforms enabling the publishing and consumption of raw content are corralling social media's energy. And they're doing it, in large part, by restoring the fun that's all but disappeared from older, more established platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
As the glob of humanity surrounding Neistat throngs Anaheim's once peaceful Stoddard Park, hundreds of free pizzas go largely ignored. Neistat grabs a megaphone and addresses the crowd, thanking them for coming out for Beme. Then he makes his way to home plate of the park's baseball diamond. The kids who are here to meet him form a selfie line that extends 200 yards from home plate to what might be the parking lot were this an actual baseball stadium. It remains in place for three hours. The Anaheim police force shows up with five vehicles. A ranger pulls her pickup onto the infield, trying to figure out whether this gathering with a permit for 100 people intentionally left off a zero. The kids are beaming like it's Christmas morning. Actually, they are probably happier than that.
It's all pretty raw.
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