Catfish: deceive and reject, ICT style
First was the documentary, now Catfish is in its second season of MTV reality TV craze. It all started with an e-mail/Facebook/phone love story that turned into real-life heartbreak, filmed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, brother of the “catfished” Nev.
To pretend to be someone you're not online by posting false information, such as someone else's pictures, on social media sites usually with the intention of getting someone to fall in love with you.
Those who have never idealized a person based on the bits of information (and those carefully edited pictures) found on the web, let them cast the first stone. For all others, naive dreamers, the technology-mediated world is a dangerous place. Of course, deception is nothing new and whoever read Charles de Laclos’s 18th century epistolary novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses knows that words that come in envelopes are a very effective tool of seduction.
The difference is that now, the omnipresent communication and information technologies create a notion that they reveal all.
The web, apps, social media present themselves as if they were in the business of transparency (and yes, this is ironic given the recent NSA scandal) , as if the ostensibly all-embracing information to be found there was real. What Catfish in fact shows is not just human deception, but, for the most part, self-deception by technology. We have become so used to our own everyday tricks of ICT editing—the beautified pictures, the amazing jobs, the crazy parties—that we have become the first to fall for them. We expect the lives of others to be fabulous because this is how we style our own lives.
The bitter, yet nonetheless optimistic part lies in the acts of verification: in Catfish (both movie and TV series) the main characters confront each other in the unmediated real world, which usually boils down to the world of the ordinary. It is a disappointment not just because it is proof of ICT trickery, but because reality turns out to be unremarkable. But it is also optimistic: it shows that people still care about the plain reality. ICTs may put all on display, but off-line verification (in the end, verus means truth) can only happen if we have interest in the real.
