How is the identity of women mediated via the Internet and why is this problematic? - Kirsten Toye

Catfish is a documentary film made in 2010. Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman produced it and Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost directed it. The film is about a man called Nev who is a photographer that’s lives in New York with his brother Ariel and friend Henry Joost. An 8-year-old girl, Abby Pierce started to paint pictures of his photographs and sends them to him through the post. Nev becomes friends Abby and her family on Facebook. Nev becomes close to her half sister Megan, who is a songwriter who lives in Gladstone, Michigan. Nev later finds out that Megan isn’t a songwriter, nor the person he was chatting too. Abby is not a child prodigy and isn’t really into painting or drawing. Angela is the one who did all the paintings but mediated herself as many other different people.


The identity of the women, Angela, is mediated over the internet using Facebook. She has mediated herself as many different people coming from the same family. She has mediated herself as a little 8-year-old girl called Abby, who was painting pictures of Nev’s photographs. She also mediated herself as a 19-year-old girl called Megan, who was Abby’s half sister, who was starting a long distant relationship with Nev, and she also mediated herself as Angela, the mother of Abby and Megan who had cancer. None of this was true.


The woman has shown different identities to Nev. She made any different identities to make it seen real, and they were living a real life, but there were some things that didn’t piece together that made Nev realise that this wasn’t right. She has created multiple profiles of different people and represented parts of her own identity in them. This is problematic because anyone can put a false identity on the internet, through social networking sites and miss lead people. Although this is a serious case, it could lead to things much worse such as rape, murder, abduction and many more, as people can create a person who looks very real and start a friendship or relationship, like Nev and Megan did. Angela is committing major crimes as well as miss leading people. The people she stole identity from were people she knew, but stealing an identity is a crime.