Post 3

    Watching Catfish, we, as viewers, are presented with Nev's narrative of being mislead in an online relationship by someone using a false identity - Angela. There is a lot to consider about their relationship as far as technology enables Angela to falsify her interaction with Nev. Using Alone Together by Sherry Turkle as an overarching source for this course, we could relate Catfish to Turkle's view of technology distorting face-to-face interaction. While a valid and interesting point, there is a deeper separation between Angela and Nev's relationship; and it's one Angela built. The situation presented in Catfish further this idea of people not being comfortable interacting with others, then pushes the concept to the extreme as Angela isn't comfortable in her online self so much so she creates a false identity on Facebook to interact with others.
    Nev has doubts about Megan, the girl he has been having an online relationship with, and decides he and his friends will visit her and her family and find the truth. Nev discovers Angela is not who she says she is online and quickly pieces her together as the mastermind of Megan's false Facebook profile. When he confronts her, there are some tense moments as Angela and Nev discuss her false identity. Specifically when Angela is drawing Nev near the end of the movie, she still builds a type of mediation between herself and Nev. The drawing pad she places between them acts as the fake Facebook profile did before she was discovered. Angela was not confident in herself to talk to Nev online without this barrier. When she then was forced to face Nev in real life, she needed another barrier to mediate their conversation. The drawing pad acted as this mediation. Similarly, there was a teddy bear that Angela carried around most of the time that her and Nev were talking in Catfish. If Angela was not holding either of these, in every scene of her and Nev discussing any topic whatsoever, Angela was doing something. Her activities, the teddy bear, or the drawing pad all act as a sort of mediation between Angela and Nev; just as Megan's Facebook profile did online.
Angela's use of defensive mechanisms to separate herself from others to gain confidence, support both Turkle's idea of technology deteriorating face-to-face contact and that people hide as much as they can when they are not confident in themselves or what they are saying. In this latter concept Turkle specifically cites websites that allow anonymous posting as proof that people need anonymity as a sort of protection - just like Angela did.