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.