Marina Lazo's Prompt

 I remember just before we watched the movie Catfish, we saw the trailer for it. After watching the trailer I didn't know what to expect from the movie. I thought it was going to be almost like a horror film. At the very end of the trailer Nev puts his hand over the camera and says,"shut that off!" It was as if he didn't want anyone to know what was going on. There were also things in the trailer that said, you will not believe what is discovered from the film, etc.
After watching the film and realizing what actually happened I understand why Nev might not want others to know what happened. There was one part in the movie that really stood out to me. When he went to meet the real Angela, he was very surprised to see who she really was. And towards the end of the film Angela has him on a chair. She begins to paint him and she says he has a beautiful smile. She stares at him for an awkwardly long amount of time. As he looks at the camera we can see how uncomfortable he is in this situation. Angela keeps on complement him on his smile and saying that he keeps changing his smile so she keeps changing it on the painting.
I also I'm going to use the Dove commercial. This commercial is about a little girl who passes by all these images of half naked women. She is bombarded with all these images of what a perfect Woman look like and what a perfect women must do. The message at the very end of the  commercial says talk to you were little girl before anyone else does. This really got me to think that girls are being affected by these kinds of images. They see these "perfect woman" that they can never become. Yet they still try to do everything they can to be just like them instead of accepting who they are.

Kenny Zheng

The film Catfish is a great film that teaches people our generation how dangerous and unsafe the Internet world can be and how easy your personal information can be compromised by other people online. I enjoy the film greatly and was attracted by the film whole time because the film provides a feeling of mysterious of what might be happening and leaves many good questions on why would someone do such thing, another reason I believe the film caught my attention greatly is because the film was categorized under documentary, which means the people that shows up in the film were not actors and all the things they did or shown to us was an actual event. 

 

During class, people pointed out that the reflection of the screen on Nev’s glasses represents the blindness of Internet, I really like the idea of people thinking Internet blinds people and I couldn’t agree more with the idea. I was growing up being told that seeing is believing, but as technology our generation progressives each day and any normal people can become a supermodel, seeing should not mean believing, another source to back up this idea is from an internet video under the title Tuning Pizza into Supermodel, where someone, with the help of Photoshop and other online tool, turn an ordinary pizza into a good looking model, the video was short but brings out huge message, it tells us that not everything we see online is real and we should not trust anything we see.

 

In addition to the information above, after watching the film “Meeting the Girl in Picture”, we found out the real name for the girl is Aimee and she’s a photographer and a model, who makes money out of the way they look, but when a normal looking person can be as beautiful as a professional model in Dove commercial, what will the modeling industry be like in the future and what will the meaning of beauty be?

     After watching the movie Catfish, there were three main questions that I left with. What are the sociological factors associated with people lying on social media? What are the psychological factors associated with people lying on social media? Which of the two (sociological or psychological) is more influential? The average person does not just hop onto the Internet and just decide to create fake people and go on with it for months. The complexity and sophistication in the web of profiles was astounding to where I don't think someone who is just bored could come up with that. I really feel like there had to be some sort of disorder involved and I am curious as to what that it.

    In regards to sociological factors, I think the front-running explanation would be the societal perfection that is placed on women especially. Angela herself said the the profile and life of Megan Faccio was built around what she wished her own life was like. Megan was a young dancer and singer, both things that Angela gave up in her life. So was it the pressure by society as a whole to make women as perfect as possible lead Angela back to those earlier times and make Megan? I think it is definitely possible. Even in the small town of Ishpeming, Michigan with a population less than 10,000 she felt that pressure, which shows that it is everywhere.
     A lot of people have probably felt that pressure, but hardly any of them cave like Angela did and resort to compulsive behaviors like she did. I would guarantee that there is some sort of mental condition associated with compulsive lying. I have known a couple people in my life who are horribly compulsive liars and it shocks me the things that they say, just like Nev was shocked when Angela told him that she has cancer after the whole Facebook was unveiled. There has to be a serious condition that is associated with this, I just do not know what it is.
     If I had to pick which of the two is probably more influential based on the Catfish case, I would say the psychological factors. They are inside of her head, they don't go away. Sure the pressure from society is strong, but it is more easily ignorable. The whole movie, these were just a few things that I was wondering.

Justin Osburn Prompt

The film Catfish did a great job of conveying topics that i could chose for my paper three image analysis. Catfish shows about the manipulative skills people can use when using social media in today's society. They can create themselves into the person whom they want to be rather than the person they actually are. They can edit their profile that makes them more "cool" and can also use filters and technology to adjust how they look and improve on their features which can make them look "beautiful" as viewed in today's society. I chose to analyze the image where Nev is looking at the computer screen right as he began to figure out that Megan is lying to him. He looked shocked and there was a glare on his glasses almost signalling that he was being blinded by what was really going on. It was like he wanted he and Megan to happen and just couldn't accept the fact that she might not be who she really is. For the requirements of the paper however we needed to make sure that we had three sources to reference to. So along with Alone Together and Catfish  I needed to make sure I found one more source that could tie everything together. I decided to use the video Dove Evolution. This video showed what people can do with makeup and technology. They were able to make a complete transformation of a person and she did not even look anything like how she did previously. I talked about how people can do things like that and make that how they look on social media. You never know the person who you are talking to on the other end of the screen. You almost cannot meet people over social media anymore because you never know if they are truly who they say they are. Classmates if you could tell me what you think about the 

Meeting the Girl in the Pictures and Catfish

Yellow

The outside source Meeting the Girl in the Pictures definitely affected how I viewed the film. To begin, I thought the film was produced well and the events that went on were very interesting. The story of Angela and Nev was captivating and left me wanting to know more about the events that went on between them. I was very engaged in the story of Angela and Nev but never once did I question who the real Megan was in the pictures. Although I knew Megan was an actual person, I figured that she was just a photographer that had her personal pictures stolen and used by a person faking her identity. I did not put much thought into how the real "Megan" would feel knowing her pictures were stolen and someone was using her identity. I was not sure if the real Megan even knew her pictures were stolen- I figured she did not know. After watching the documentary of meeting the actual girl in the pictures, I realized that the girl in the pictures was a real person too. She had a name, Aimee, and she also had her own life as a photographer, model, and wife. Aimee had no idea her pictures had been stolen and used to create a fake life and pursue a relationship. When Aimee found out, she was definitely confused and distraught about the events that had occurred. Before watching the documentary with Aimee, I did not think much about how it would affect her. Just how I did not think of the effects on Aimee, Angela did not think of the effects either. At first I thought Angela did know Aimee as a family friend as she told Nev, but in the end we learned that Aimee was not connected to Angela at all. This further proved how much Angela had lied and how she did not think much about how her actions could affect the lives of the people she pretended to be. 

Catfish and the safety of secrecy

When I watched the movie Catfish I was struck by several thoughts, mainly about how this is a true story and could happen to anybody. Most people have been warned to be careful on what they post or what they share, but many people are still entirely too free with the information they give.

I remember seeing a post online about a girl who said some awfully crude things online where she thought she was safe, but she had posted her hometown and the name of the store she worked at on her Facebook page, which allowed people to find out exactly where she worked. I say she was lucky because she had generated enough hate online and given enough information that someone could have gone to her workplace and attacked her. Instead, someone called her workplace and got her fired.

Something similar could have happened to Nev in Catfish. Angela had his address long before he met her, so he never really verified that she was a safe person to talk to. Instead of Angela being behind the screen, imagine if it was a serial killer looking for easy prey, and Nev was easy prey. Things could have gotten real bad, real fast. Nev actually proved my point when he went to visit Megan without giving any kind of warning. If Angela would have hooked someone with a tendency for violence rather than kind ol' Nev she could have found herself getting attacked when they discovered her deception.

The best practices for meeting with people that you meet online is to meet in a public place. In the case of Catfish, where Angela never really wanted to meet Nev, the safest bet would have been for Nev to keep pushing to meet and when he kept getting refusals then he should have broken it off. That or use something like Skype. I mean, jeez, he didn't try to verify who she was for the longest time. Of course, his lack of secrecy with his personal information kind of ruined his chances of being safe from the get go, but still.

Finding the Truth

        Catfish showed that point that the potential dangers of online relationships. And how sometimes the lies that people may tell could possibly be found out with some research. Nev took some time before he actually realized all the lies that were coming from his online relationship with Angela and Abby. This may be because he didn't find a reason to second guess Abby or did want to realize that Megan may not be who she said she was.

      Either way, even though the internet allowed Angela to make those fake profiles and manipulate Nev or to believing that this family existed, Angela is in the end, responsible for her own actions. Facebook did not make those profiles, Angela did. Having online relationships are only potentially dangerous if it is not ensured that the person you are talking to is telling the truth. When Nev met up with the “real Meagan”, Aimee Gonzalez, she mentioned that it would be possible that he could met the real person and that if could have worked out, it just didn’t this time.        

     I feel that it is okay to check up on the people you are talking to on the internet. Maybe looking up a song that they claimed to have made like Nev did, or imaging searching their profile pictures. I actually don’t find it invasive since they did after all put their information up on display. Also you are unable to be there to know what they are actually doing in their everyday lives. Although I can see how it would be hard to actually do the research that Nev did and finding out the truth could because they are wanting the relationship to be true. Like how on the show Catfish, many people want to find out the truth, but are scared that it won’t be what they were hoping for.
-Ryan Smith

Spring 2015 students!

Refer to the very first post of the blog for instructions.

The deadline for posting Prompt 3 to this blog is April 30.