Catfish

Catfish the film perfectly demonstrates that due to modern technology, such as the internet, today’s society can now have two different identities, a real-life one and a virtual one. A real-life identity is how a person physically appears and behaves in their daily lives. A virtual identity is part of an interface that represents the user in a virtual world such as a chat room, video game, or virtual common space. Thanks to the internet, a person can present themselves differently on the web compared to reality. Virtual identities can vary from an avatar in an online video game to a profile on social media. By making a virtual identity, people are able to escape their real-life identity for a moment. For example, gamers are able to be who they really want to be in the world of their video games. They are able to customize their avatars how they want them to be. Gamers are also able to act differently because they are able to pick usernames and remain anonymous. To such a degree, people do the same thing on their social media accounts. They customize their accounts, or virtual identities, to how they want others to view them. People select and post their best pictures of themselves because in a way, they want to be seen as perfection. However, there does exist a further extreme of a virtual identity, and it is called catfishing. According to Urban Dictionary, “A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they are not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.” Angela, the catfish, created virtual identities to fool Nev. Her two of many virtual identities mainly consisted of Abby Pierce, an eight year old child prodigy artist, and Megan, Abby’s attractive older half-sister. There is no doubt that Angela created these identities because they were her escape rope from her actual life. She explains to Nev that through her online friendship with him, she was able to reconnect with the world of painting and dancing, which had been her two major passions before she had to sacrifice her career to marry Vince which came with the burden of constantly caring of two mentally disabled children. Furthermore, she says, “The personalities that came out were just fragments of what I used to be.” Our virtual identities are definitely a part of us; however, they are not hundred percent. In a way, Angela was a gamer and her fake Facebook profiles were merely avatars.