Junk Explained: What Is This ‘Bitstrips’ Thing All About?
The new app has been downloaded by 20 million people, and it's taken over Facebook. Why for?
Unless you have signed some kind of blood pact with all your Facebook friends to exclusively post content that will irritate no-one (in which case, hope you are enjoying the inevitable gallery upon gallery of tumbleweed GIFs!), then for the past week and a half your newsfeed will have been filling up with comic snapshots featuring characters that look a bit like your friends.
What even is this?
It’s an app called Bitstrips which shot up to #1 in the iPhone app store last week. Using Bitstrips, people make avatars of themselves and then place them in any one of a series of cartoon panels. You can interact with friends who also have the app, and tweak things like facial expressions and speech bubbles. In terms of complexity it lies somewhere down from The Sims, but up from the ‘My Family’ stickers on the backs of cars.
According to the app description, you can “join over 20 million people around the world using Bitstrips as a more fun and visual way to communicate with friends.”
So: a lot of people are using it — enough for posts like this to exist — but what exactly are they using it to say to one another?
Bitstrips is centred around scenarios that are either light takes on social interactions, whimsical fantasies, or a means to express your state of mind or an aspect of your personality. It’s pretty similar to how Facebook constantly wants to know “What’s on your mind?” — but instead of a pithy post or a gallery of trout pouts, Bitstrip users will put up what normally comes across as a cartoonised version of a Dad joke or, even more simply, an image of a thing you are probably not actually doing. Perhaps it’s a picture of you as a zombie reaching out to a hospitality worker because you’re “not human until you’ve had your morning coffee”, or one where you and a friend might be reaching out to devour a box of hypothetical chocolates in a room that you are not physically occupying together.
Why is this even a thing?
Like all forms of social media, Bitstrips is used for any number of reasons. Primarily, the goal is to amuse yourself and your friends, and whatever, I’ll admit it – it’s fun to see “yourself” in scenarios which you can’t (or probably wouldn’t want to) experience in real life. I never got one of those personalised Barbie books for my seventh birthday, and as a result, no Generic Brunette Character #38 was named after me and sent on an adventure in Ken’s haunted dreamhouse (giggity). Anyway, now I get to make myself travel through time or hide amidst a zombie horde.
Bitstrips also provides the opportunity for people to get uncomfortably close to home truths or underlying desires whilst hidden under the blanket of humour. The scenarios are wildly varied. They include normal and tame images and interactions, such as critiquing a friend’s Halloween costume or admitting your level of unfitness. Then it takes the uncomfortable jump towards virtual proposals, dependent relationships, and bastardised scenes from films, until it goes right towards the borderline disturbing.
Ever wanted to see what it would look like to behead or be beheaded by a friend? Or even yourself? How about witnessing yourself burning in hell as Satan watches on? Now’s your chance!
Haters Gonna Hate
Much like everything that goes on the internet ever, kittens included, Bitstrips has its haters. As fast as the image sharing has spread, so too has the distribution of links showing people how to block the app from their newsfeed.
Some people are so fed up with the waste of time that Bitstrips represents, that they’ve taken to status updates and forums to express just how it makes them feel. “No more bitstrip! Let’s bitSTOP!” says one Facebook user, while another promises that they’re going to “kick you in the Bitstrip.” Another person took the ironic step of using Bitstrip to express their hatred of Bitstrip.
Really though, they just need to wait it out, the same way we waited out the “I’m going to this obscure country for a weird amount of months” posts; the same way I’m waiting out that Scarlett Johansson falling meme.
If haters gonna hate, it would be more constructive to direct their concerns towards some of the creepy as literal hell scenarios. Or, better yet, the fact that the current app forces users to connect with Facebook, and so any friends who have the app also have access to each other’s avatars without having to do so much as a “friend request”. Using a friend’s avatar? They don’t get a notification. The first they hear of it is when they find a creepy picture of them, say, switching bodies with you, when it gets posted to Facebook.
Bitstrips is pretty weird. But then again, so are status updates. And tweets. And Instagram posts.
The net goal of all of these is the same: to present an image. In the case of Bitstrips, this image is a literal one. And it might feature zombies.
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Elizabeth is a freelance writer with a focus on film, television and pop culture. She edits Subterranean Death Cult, has been published in Film Ink, Metro, The Punch, and Lip Magazine, and tweets terrible puns @ElizabethFlux