Catfish is an American documentary created in 2010. It was about a man, Nev, who was being filmed by his brother and friend. The plot of Catfish circles around Nev, and how he builds a relationship with a family, and even furthering into a romantic relationship all via the Internet. He sees Abby’s work in the newspaper, and asks her if he would paint her pictures of his photography. He becomes friends with the family, and his so called “girlfriend” on Facebook, interacting with them through this social networking site, then later furthering to the telephone and mail.
Abby Pierce is an eight-year-old artist who lives in Ishpeming, Michigan. Abby sends Nev paintings, including paintings of his own photography. This is what bonded Nev and Abby’s family together. Because of this, they all became friends on Facebook; including Angela, Abby’s Mother, Angela's husband, and Megan, Abby’s older sister, who becomes Nev’s “girlfriend.”
For the documentary, Ariel and Henry (Nev’s brother and friend) film Nev and his long distance, Internet relationship with Megan. Through their relationship, Nev starts to unravel that Megan is a big phony. She sends him her so called music, but when Nev researches her “songs” he realizes they’re not hers at all, they were taken from other song artists.
Ariel urges Nev to continue with the documentary. Nev and the other two boys eventually make their way to Michigan and make a surprise appearance at Abby’s house to confront the lying family. When they arrive they figure out the Megan does not even exist. Abby does have a sister Megan but they have not seen her in months. The pictures of Megan were actually pictures of a family friend of Angela’s, and it turned out he was the one communicating with Nev the whole entire time. All the pictures and friends that were used on Angela, Megan and Angela’s husband’s Facebook were fake, and all made up. Nev also finds out that Abby is not as good of an artist as he thought. She cares little for painting or drawing altogether, and in reality is Angela doing most of the painting.
Angela made these Facebooks’ in order to escape her daily life at home and the sacrifices she had to make in order to raise a family.
This whole documentary exhibits and clearly demonstrates what has been shown throughout our whole course. Catfish shows how truly anonymous the Internet can be. Any person can pretend to be any one they want. I can make a Facebook account saying I am Jessica Alba, and I can have people believing me. It is scary that I can take anyone’s pictures and remake an account for them if I wanted to. Creepy stalker men can be on Facebook, looking through any girl’s pictures and downloading them to their computer. You can be talking to any person and not truly know if its them or not. It is scary to think that this could happen to anyone. I know from experience that my friend Carlin had a fake Facebook made about her. It was all her information, and all her pictures, but she was not the one controlling what was said. She had no access to this account and eventually had to report it to Facebook. It is scary that Web 2.0 allows this to happen. Everyone’s information is so easily accessible to us at any given time. This is how false information, and false accounts occur. It should be more regulated, but it is very difficult to do so.
I found Catfish extremely interesting. It was so cool to watch Nev unravel Angela’s secrets and lies, and witness everything she did, and all the trouble she went through to talk to Nev. She made a fake account, made fake friends, used fake pictures, all to have a long distance relationship. Web 2.0 makes this easy to do, and can happen to any normal person at any time.
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