Catfish

I though the movie “Catfish” was somewhat of a bizarre movie. The only thing that I could think about when watching this movie was all of the online relationships with people that I had throughout high school. To this day I have friendships with people that I have never met in person. I have skyped with them so I assume that are actual people, but watching this movie did cause me to doubt some of these “friendships”. It astounded me that someone would go through such as effort that Angela went through to be somebody that they are not. While watching the movie I could not help but feel bad for Angela. She was desperately trying to escape reality and in doing so she hurt someone that was incredibly nice to her. 

     I believe that this movie future shows that media specifically social media is taking over many peoples lives. Some people, like Angela, are so amerced in these social media sites that they sometimes even forget who they are. As many have us know social media sites can become addicting and Angela found out it can lead to hurting those you care about. I don’t believe that Angela wanted to hurt Nev and she probably hated herself for deceiving him but it her will to be someone else that drove her to mislead him.

     Since the emergence of Web 2.0 I am sure that this was not the first case similar to this where lies are made up and people are deceived over facebook, twitter, or even myspace. Back when myspace was popular I would sometimes get a friend request from someone that was very suspicious and whose profile looked forged. I have not encountered nearly as many since joining facebook, but I am sure they exist. I try to be careful to not accept a request on facebook unless it is from a person that I already know. I do not want to end up like Nev and be deceived so much by someone. In essence one could say that this is exactly the type of thing that Andrew Keen is trying to warn people against.

     Andrew Keen is openly against Web 2.0 and thinks it could bring about the downfall of our generation. These are exactly the incidents that he is trying to warn us about. People can be any number of things with the help of the internet. It is so simple to great a false facebook profile and pretend to be someone that you are not He also talks about how people can take over what professionals do just because they might be good with computers.

     After watching this movie I really know how careful one needs to be when starting up and online friendship with someone body. Often time people are not what they may seem; they could even be completely different person. I now know that I need to be sure that the person is a real person or not some person trying to be something that they are not. I do not want to end up in a situation like Nev and be used in someone’s desire to be something they are not.