What's Behind the Monitor?

The film “Catfish” was interesting and creepy with a mix of sadness in it. The film brings out how people would abuse today’s social media through falsehood and escaping realty. The people that you meet online will be not who you think they are in general. In the beginning of the film, Nev fell victim of the web of lies that Angela constructed in Facebook. By creating seventeen different profile personas and stories to fabricate “Megan”, Nev actually believed she was real and was in a “relationship” with her for eight months on the phone. Eventually, Nev was lucky to uncover the lies and ended Angela’s illusion of herself, and his own illusion of “Megan”.

            However, though their relationship ended peacefully, what prompt Angela to create a false sense of identity of herself and manage to allure and trick Nev? Misleading someone for eight months takes skill of an imaginative storyteller. What makes Angela’s stories so real or believable is probably part of her real self was inserted into the fake stories. Angela’s persona, “Megan”,was an representation of her aspirations and dreams. Angela wanted a different life than her current position she now was in. Being a full time mother and taking care of the house with one seven-year-old daughter and two adult handicap sons is tough. What kept her sane still was probably because of her hobby of painting, which she tries to make it a living. Having a disappointed life, that one could say, is what trigger Angela to live in make-up world through social media. Being a person that she wished to be in online that she could not be in real life was her only feeling of happiness.

            In another way, it could be reverse from the other way around. I believed that social media creates a false world where everyone create an avatar. People project themselves in a certain image in a way that feels true to them, not a lie but a secret part of their personality. Like while one is daydreaming, people think of fantasies of themselves or doing something that they cannot do in real life. By using the internet, one can form a digital identity that sometime creates a different persona that people make to unleashed hidden feelings that one cannot show in their real life. Angela was dissatisfied in her current marriage life and was flirting and “cheating” with Nev through texting and Facebook. What is scary about social media is that people reveled dark, hidden parts of themselves that people do not expect of them in real life. Forums, YouTube, video games, etc., have real people using fake names and pictures to hide their real identity to unleash their unfiltered opinions in bad or inappropriate ways. Having a false identity is what allowed them to express who they really are.