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.

Image Analysis

Dolls symbolize perfection, glamour, fantasy and fulfillment. Barbie is always smiling, living her life in Malibu with her boyfriend Ken. She is also able to fulfill her dreams in any profession that she wants... But what if dolls were imperfect?

            In a photograph taken by Vivian Maier, a doll is shown in a trash can. The doll’s clothes are ripped and dirty. Its’ face has scratches and dirt on it. The doll is enclosed in the trash can. The doll is clearly imperfect. Who wants to love an imperfect doll? This question leads to the reason why we perform on social media the way we do. We fear not being loved. We fear being unwanted. We fear being alone. We fear being imperfect but we are indeed imperfect. It’s a hard reality to face because much like the imperfect doll enclosed by the trash can we are trapped by are imperfections. When I look at this photo I see us inside the trash can and everything outside of it as a society pushing us to be something we are not. We are the beautifully imperfect dolls trapped in a society that tells us how we should look, how we should act, and how we should think. Consequently, this enables incidents such as “catfishing” to happen. If Angela would have been completely honest from the beginning, would Nev had loved her for who she is? No. Nev was clearly looking for a woman that exemplified society’s standards of beauty. After all Megan is skinny, blonde, has light eyes, and is a professional model. Nev fell in love with Angela’s personality but Megan’s physical appearance. Because Angela knew this fact, she kept up her façade. 

Maddy Whittington

The Dove "Onslaught" Advertisements show us how powerful outside sources can be over women's thoughts about themselves. They trick women into thinking that you have to look like that, and you will look like that if you use their product. Women then look at these photos and buy their makeup to use as a shield to cover up their flaws and make themselves “perfect” like the women in the photographs. The company is trying to make us believe that in order to love yourself and be accepted they have to look perfect. That is why so many people hide their true selves because they have always been told if they have a flaw it needs to be covered up, and hidden. Advertisers also use technology as a shield to make their product flawless, but they are lying, to buyers, about the true ability their product holds. They try to make it seem like if you use their product it will make you perfect and desirable, which is a lie. The tactics of these companies have truly made women believe they are not

beautiful if they do not look like those models in the pictures. They then go fulfill their self-esteem issues through editing their pictures and lying about their lives online to make themselves feel wanted.

 

Transformations on the Screen

            In today’s society, it is not uncommon to run into multiple beauty advertisements as you are simply going through you everyday life. There are billboards on highways of flawless models with perfect hair, skin, and teeth, all telling you to “be like them and buy this product.” The beauty industry is sending out an unrealistic type of person and society has been conforming to make their idea of beauty, a standard for beauty. The beauty industry has greatly influenced the world in the sense that people are now taking new measures to fit their standards. One prevalent way is that people of all ages are editing their photos on Facebook or changing their identity as a whole. Many people edit their photo in some type of way. I am a victim of this; on the social media site Instagram, I put a filter on my photos in order to put a different lighting on my photos. Although it is a minute change to my photos, it still happens in order to make it more suitable for all my friends and family to see.

            Sometimes, people may even go as far as to change whom they are completely online. The movie Catfish told a story about when Nev Schulman was tricked online by Angela Wesselman. She pretended to be her daughter, Megan, who was around Nev’s age in order to talk to him, flirt with him, and eventually date him. It wasn’t until a few months in until he realized Megan was not who she said she was. One possible reason Angela did this was because she felt as though she wouldn’t be good enough for somebody if she was open about herself. She clearly thought it was easier to hide behind a screen because she never came out to Nev about who she truly was.

            I feel like there needs to be a new change in society. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is trying to initiate the change we need to see happen in society. Their goal is to make women feel beautiful and embrace themselves for who they are, not by what they could be if they give into beauty pressures. I fully support this change because it is not right of the beauty industry to make women feel insecure about themselves. Uniqueness is important in a culture; it sets everybody aside from one another and lets everybody be themselves.

Fake or real?

Between technology advancements like photo shop, fake profiles, and hiding in virtual games, technology has consumed our lives. We escape from reality and make our own virtual world to forget the bad in the world, even though the bad in the world challenges your good. We create fake profile to make ourselves feel better, but play with everyone’s emotions and fall in love with the person you are talking to, but you’re profile picture is not you. They fall in love with the idea of the person and not the actual person. Once you get caught and meet face to face, all of that changes and all that’s left is hate and betrayal from toying with their emotions. Also, all of the fake beauty created for this world, doesn’t help. It all ties together. Creating photos of people that are unobtainable to become, you make people want to run and hide to virtual worlds and create fake profiles to be loved. Technology has given us the opportunity to run and create the unobtainable and the virtually reality that we all hope at the end of the day are real. Technology makes issues and consumes us and we can never escape; It is an addiction and we never want to stop and we never will.

           

If Only She Knew

SL056 MW

The Onslaught campaign ad, made by Dove, a cosmetics company, ironically exposes the ways in which the beauty industry, through the use of media, has influenced society's perception of what beauty is. That has specially had an impact on how women view their aesthetics, since they're constantly being targeted by cosmetics companies and fashion brands to look and dress in certain ways. Not to abide by those beauty conventions is to live under the manufactured threat of being less than. In a frantic attempt to give this situation a solution, the ad ends with an appeal to parents [and I dare to say other family members, too] to talk to their daughters about beauty before the beauty industry, channeled through conventional and social media, does.

As for me, I have always meant to tell my once almost-girlfriend how beautiful she was. But as much as I wanted to, her child-like face glowing under the sunshine made me grow weak inside and concealed my words within my mind. Her countenance, a reflection of all I thought of her, kept me wondering night and day how one smile could weaken the knees of this brother and prevent me from walking any further.

Everyday, the anxiety of looking at her again filled my heart with gladness. As I contemplated the body in which she was wrapped up as a gift to the eyes of every observer, I couldn’t help but wonder how intricately designed she was.
Her smile, blooming from her eyes down to her mouth, gave a sneak peak into the story of one whose path was never short of trials yet, always exceeding in joy and love. She was someone I loved!

I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but I always thought it too obvious for her not to notice. To say she was pretty, I often thought, was an unnecessary redundancy, so I refrained from letting her know and avoided being called silly. “She surely knows how appreciative I am of her kindness and empathy. Should she not be aware of her own beauty?”

Apparently, though, to my shame and regret, it was never that obvious nor clear for her that what I appreciated in her body was what she already had. Little did I know that underneath her naturally gifted body, was a weak mind and a fragile soul, later held hostage like a will-less doll to every wave of opinions and beauty conventions.

So it was that day after day she started loving less of her unique attributes and as a marionette, she donated her limbs to the art of self-rejection that some have deceitfully called, fashion.

I, a once passionate appreciator of her beauty and a conscious observer of her character, could never grasp the grounds on which she stood in discontentment with her own appearance. So much was her inaptitude to accept herself as she had always been that she tried to correct her "imperfections" with pierced ears, shaded eyes, painted lips and dyed hair. All of this in an attempt to make herself worthy of care. If only she knew she already had what she was trying to attain. If only she knew I didn't care about her tangled and unbrushed hair. If only she knew that what she counted as physical flaws and imperfections were attributes that gained her everybody's admiration. If only she would remove the shades off her eyes to see her true beauty come alive... Maybe, just maybe, she would attest to the fact that one's true beauty is neither found in models nor in bottles.

Prompt 3 catfish

Before taking W131 this semester I was aware of the term “catfish”. I knew there was a TV series behind it but never caught any of the episodes (Catfish: The TV Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2498968/episodes?year=2012&ref_=tt_eps_yr_2012), not my thing, but anything MTV airs is bound to reach at least my ears at some point. I just didn’t go out of my way to check out the show, though. You know what I mean? Anyways, I was fairly surprised to find out we would be watching the movie from which the TV series is named after in our class film study. Simply called Catfish (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/?ref_=ttmd_md_nm), this film documents a heavily doctored and unauthentic relationship, between a filmmaker (Nev) and who he thought was a beautiful artist (Meagan), which was only possible with the existence of social networks. And one other reason.

Turns out, “Megan” doesn’t even exist. She was a creation of the internet along with several other profiles, spawned by Angela. Angela used her talent for painting, claiming it was the work of her young daughter-in-actual-existence, Abby. Nev ate up the artwork like a dog and its food bowl, he loved it. This left him vulnerable, easy to exploit, easy to fake date over the web by hiding behind images of other people.  As story goes along, Nev begins to notice the several inconsistencies in the bologna story that he consumed and thought tasted pretty good, until it came back up.  He realizes that Angela is just some distraught woman in Michigan, who does not match her online identity. She also doesn’t have a daughter named Megan who Nev developed a deep attachment for. Angela was Meg. Angela was a lot of people, but she wasn’t herself.  She was just unhappy. She acted out to escape herself and her reality because she desired to be someone else.  This is the second reason why her façade was able to take place.

The desire to be someone else is the result of the insidious consumer industry that has been ripping us off for far, far too long. Wanting nothing but our dollars, corporations will stop at no end to make sure you are spending your money. Even if it means your wellbeing is on the line. The Dove Beauty Pressure video is a perfect snapshot of the beauty industry and its relentless attack on your mind with ad campaign after ad campaign after ad campaign. These companies have perfected their advertising for decades and know exactly how to rewire your brain to think you need more. And for the unfortunate people who can’t always get more, they know how to make us very unhappy, like Angela. See Angela is a victim of the consumer industry. She, like all of us, is being bombarded with doctored ads featuring ultra-human models and other manipulative marketing techniques. Over time it has broken down her will to see the good in herself because she can’t match up with photoshopped models or run out and buy whatever she feels like. Being desperately unhappy, Angela needed a way to cope. Thus we have the art of castfishing.

Catfish

When most people hear the word catfish they think of the fish. Today the word has a new meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with amphibians. Now it means that someone, somewhere in the world is pretending to be some they are not. This all takes place while sitting in front of a computer screen or in the palm of your hand. The scary fact is that almost everyone has run across a fake account, whether they know it or not, on a social media website.

 In the movie Catfish, Nev is believed to be receiving papers from a little girl. He researches about her and the results he came up with were quite shocking. The little girl, Abby, did not like to paint. Instead, her mother, Angela, created a web of lies to wrap Nev up into all of it. She had him believe that he was in a relationship with Megan. The whole time Angela was pretending to be Megan and painting the pictures she claimed were Abby’s. Nev did some inspecting and finally unraveled it all.

The whole idea of catfishing is quite horrifying. To think that who someone is on social media isn’t who they are in real life is concerning. This leads to a whole slew of issues, primarily a lack of trust. In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle talks about how people often play video games and create the perfect self-image they would want for themselves. She interviews people and they talk about how everything is some much easier in the virtual world. They can have the perfect car, the perfect house, the perfect family, and the perfect job. They live out their dream life through a video game avatar. This is how I see a catfish. I think someone who performs a catfish is someone who wishes they could change themselves. They create a fake account and try to make that account perfect. They create a perfect fake name, create the perfect bio, and then they scope the internet for the perfect picture to wrap the whole account together. They then scope out the perfect target to play victim in their game of trying to improve themselves.

America in Color

Choosing images for this paper was hard. Throughout all of the sources, there were over a hundred (or at least it seemed) to choose from. Not to mention try to relate them to my topic of people having a second, online, mystery life. Picture number six in America in Color, titled ”Headlines posted in street-corner window of newspaper office”, was taken in Brockton, Massachusetts in December of 1940. It depicts a group of men, all wearing trench coats and fedoras. As I looked into the picture deeper, trying to really depict what its meaning is, I couldn’t help but notice a few things. One being how all of the men’s fedoras were all covering their eyes, almost as if they are hiding something. Another thing that stood out is that they are all looking in different directions. One of the men is also carrying what looks to be a package or parcel. Even though social media sites weren’t around in the 1940’s, I feel that this picture is very relatable to the topic of second identities. The men look as if they are trying to conceal their own identity. Could all of these men be living alternative lives? Another reason I choose this picture is because of the parcel in the man’s hand. It reminded me of the documentary. Abby (or should we say Angela) sent Niv numerous things in the mail, all concealed, both in reality and as a figure of speech. Angela used the packages as a way to draw Niv closer to her.

Puppet Master

In class we watched and discussed the documentary Catfish. The documentary follows a photographer Nev and the online friendship he makes with a little girl Abby through paintings she does of his photographs. Over a short period the two converse quiet frequently. Other characters come into play like a mom Angela and a potential love interest Megan. As time goes on and certain things don’t add up and Nev becomes suspicious and starts to investigate further. After a surprise trip to see the family he discovers that he is being lied to and all the relationships he makes are all fake and set up by the mom Angela. This brings us back to the points of roles being played online to keep up a certain image. This is instance Angela was the ultimate puppet master and role player. She made several different Facebook profiles for people she made up and acted in the roles of what those people would do and say. This was a way for her to let out what she lacked in life and wanted to be. She used the Internet to be a more acceptable and likeable version of herself. Although, her case is an extreme one it honestly doesn’t differ that much from all of our online presence. No matter what anyone says we all want to be liked. We may not be able to alter this likeableness in real life, but in the online world this is easily achievable. We can carefully play the role we think we should fill. We do this by posting certain statuses or by editing our pictures. We take pictures of us doing certain things with certain people in order to play a certain role. We then edit those pictures to give off a more likeable appearance. So, Angela might have taken hers to an extreme all at once, but how are we so much better then her? She was at least guilty about what she had done. Through out our daily lives we lie about who we truly are on a constant basis and think nothing of it. Why? Because we can and its now socially expectable to do so. We are all trying to be a better version of ourselves so we can come across more appealing and likeable to fit into the roles we think we must play. So, although Angela was the puppet master to many different avatars at least she knew what she was controlling. We on the other hand are the puppets and our master is social media. 

Prompt 3

"A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create a false identity, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances." This is the Urban Dictionary definition of a catfish. Have you ever known someone through Instagram, Facebook, or Tinder without actually meeting him or her face to face? Then, when you meet them, they look so much different in person. Sometimes, it might just be because they edit their pictures to the extreme. In other circumstances, yes, people actually use other people's photos, which they think are more attractive then themselves, and use them as their own to get more attention and/or affection. In my English W131 class, Professor Layden introduced us to the book, Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle. In the book, it talks a lot about robots and how people actually treat them as real humans. When advertised, it makes it seem as if these fake, robot dogs, actually have real feelings. People actually buy these fake dogs and robots and brainwash you into thinking that they can actually hear what you are saying and have real emotions and responses to it. I personally think this is absolutely crazy.  In the first image attached, it shows a robot dog. In the photo, you can see that the words “your REAL best friend,” note that the word real is capitalized. In my opinion, this doesn’t look like a real dog and I could not see myself treating it as if it was. Yes, it can walk, fetch, and react to your affection. My point is, if you break it in half, it is not actually going to feel any "real" pain. This goes to show that it has a false identity of being real. These dogs could be as fake as the person you are messaging on Facebook.