Catfish Social Media

The popularity of the internet in recent years has led to the rise of a vast amount of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites give their users the ability to present and record their lives online and make it available to others to inspect. This usage is generally harmless, however a small percent of people use social media dishonestly by creating fake accounts in the effort to deceive others and boost their own egos in the process. This is shown in the direct cinema documentary Catfish, directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, the story follows Nev Schulman who develops a relationship with a family and in particular, a young woman around his own age; however, this online family has been a lie and was all a creation …show more content…
The availability and easy accessibility of social media allows people to express themselves and their personality online to a wider audience. For Angela, social media was a platform to present her art work; however it was harshly critiqued by viewers so she presented the work again under a new identity, the false image of her eight-year old daughter, Abby. Angela received a positive reception of her work while using the disguise of a talented 8-year-old. The audience is shown this by the paintings being shown on screen as the primary focus of the shot and the mentioning of the paintings being sold at an expensive price. This pathway opened up to contacting Nev after Angela painted one of his photographs in the newspaper. The result of this was the creation of the fifteen Facebook profiles to maintain a relationship with Nev with her new identity of Megan Faccio who was the similar age to Nev (Schulman & Joost, 2010). This value of identity and the idea of the various Facebook accounts is presented in the documentary with the use of graphics. While Angela and Nev are discussing the people whose information was used to create the fake accounts, on-screen the Facebook profiles are shown to the audience to create a shock of realisation and give a visual understanding to the audience of the immensity of the deception. Angela’s behaviour can be associated with having Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). She herself explains that, “The personalities that came out were just fragments of myself, what I used to be, wanted to be, never could have been” (Schulman & Joost, 2010). This piece of information shows that she is aware of what she is doing and of the other identities she assumes, thus it can be presumed that Angela has